Cloud Federation

Abstract—This paper suggests a definition of the term Cloud Federation, a concept of service aggregation characterized by interoperability features, which addresses the economic problems of vendor lock-in and provider integration. Furthermore, it approaches challenges like performance and disaster-recovery through methods such as co-location and geographic distribution. The concept of Cloud Federation enables further reduction of costs due to partial outsourcing to more cost-efficient regions, may satisfy security requirements through techniques like frag-mentation and provides new prospects in terms of legal aspects. Based on this concept, we discuss a reference architecture that enables new service models by horizontal and vertical integration. The definition along with the reference architecture serves as a common vocabulary for discussions and suggests a template for creating value-added software solutions