Defining Inter-Cloud Architecture

This poster paper presents on-going research to develop the Inter-Cloud Architecture that should address problems with multi-domain heterogeneous Cloud based applications integration and interoperability, including integration and interoperability with legacy infrastructure services. The Cloud technologies actually represent a new step in evolutional computing and communication technologies development chain. Cloud technologies are evolving as a common way of infrastructure services and resources virtualisation and provisioning on-demand. In this way they bring applications and infrastructure services mobility and physical/hardware platform independency to the existing distributed computing and networking technologies. The paper refers to existing standards in Cloud Computing, in particular, recently published NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture (CCRA). The proposed Inter-Cloud Architecture combines commonly adopted Cloud service models such as IaaS, PaaS, SaaS in one multilayer model with corresponding inter-layer interfaces. The paper also briefly presents the architectural framework for Cloud based infrastructure services provisioned on-demand being developed by authors that allows optimised provisioning of both computing, storage and networking resources. The proposed architecture is intended to provide a conceptual model for developing Inter-Cloud middleware and in this way will facilitate Clouds interoperability and integration