Cloud federation enables cloud providers to collaborate and share their resources to create a large virtual pool of resources at multiple network locations. Different types of federation architectures for clouds and datacenters have been proposed and implemented (e.g. cloud bursting, cloud brokering or cloud aggregation) with different level of resource coupling and interoperation among the cloud resources, from loosely coupled, typically involving different administrative and legal domains, to tightly coupled federation, usually spanning multiple datacenters within an organization. In both situations, an effective, agile and secure federation of cloud networking resources is key to impact the deployment of federated applications.
There is a strong industry demand for automated solutions to federate cloud network resources, and to derive the integrated management cloud layer that enables an efficient and secure deployment of resources and services independent of their location across distributed infrastructures. From big companies and large cloud providers interested in unifying and consolidating multiple data centers or cloud sites to small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) building hybrid cloud configurations, federated cloud networking is needed to support the automated deployment of applications across different clouds and data centers.
BEACON delivers a homogeneous virtualization layer, on top of heterogeneous underlying physical networks, computing and storage infrastructures, providing enablement for automated federation of applications across different clouds and datacenter.
The new inter-cloud network capabilities are leveraged by existing open source cloud platforms, OpenNebula and OpenStack, to deploy multi-cloud applications. In particular, different aspects of the platforms have been extended to accommodate the federated cloud networking features like multi-tenancy, federated orchestration of networking, compute and storage management or the placement and elasticity of the multi-cloud applications.
The objectives of the BEACON project are:
- to research and develop techniques to federate cloud network resources
- to derive the integrated management cloud layer that enables an efficient and secure deployment of federated cloud applications.
- to deliver a homogeneous virtualization layer, on top of heterogeneous underlying physical networks, computing and storage infrastructures, providing enablement for automated federation of applications across different clouds and datacenters.
The final result of the BEACON project is the BEACON framework and its open source implementation. The BEACON framework was used to add federated cloud networking functionality to the OpenStack and OpenNebula cloud platforms. The BEACON framework was validated in the BEACON testbeds with five use cases:
- Automated High Availability across Datacenters (UC1)
- Datacenter Location Aware Elasticity (UC2)
- Automated Service Function Chaining across Datacenters (UC3)
- Multi-cloud VM Security (UC4)
- Multi-cloud Deployment of an Airline Scheduling Application (UC5)
