SUPERCLOUD Architecture Specification

Today, despite apparent benefits achievable through locating business processes and data in cloudbased systems, distributed cloud computing raises many security and dependability concerns. This is caused by the increased complexity of such systems and the lack of interoperability between heterogeneous, often proprietary infrastructure technologies. SUPERCLOUD thus proposes new security and dependability infrastructure management paradigms that are : 1) user-centric, enabling self-service clouds-of-clouds where customers define their own protection requirements and can avoid technology and vendor lock-ins; and 2) self-managed, for self-protecting clouds-of-clouds that reduce their administration complexity through automation techniques. This document presents the high-level architectural framework of the SUPERCLOUD system. We define the actor roles of SUPERCLOUD users and cloud service providers (CSPs) whose services are used to compose ensembles of computation, data storage and data communication services, on which users can run desired computations and store data. We refer to such user-specific ensembles of computational, data and networking services as U-Clouds. The SUPERCLOUD architecture consists of three abstraction planes: the compute plane, the data plane and the networking plane. The purpose of each of these planes is to provide abstractions of computation, data storage and data communications services used by execution environments that SUPERCLOUD users run on the SUPERCLOUD infrastructure. A background study is presented which shows the relevant state-of-the-art literature in areas that are central to the technical implementation of SUPERCLOUD. These include works on virtualization and self-management architectures, cloud data management and network virtualization architectures. We present the common requirements for the SUPERCLOUD architecture derived from use cases related to healthcare that will be developed in WP5. As such use cases represent the highest standard for requirements regarding the privacy of data in civilian applications, we can make sure that solutions developed in SUPERCLOUD will have sufficient means for protection of data privacy also in most other application areas. Another important aspect of the SUPERCLOUD architecture addressed in this document is the notion of security self-management. The SUPERCLOUD architecture provides a security management framework that connects to each sub-architecture and provides facilities allowing each SUPERCLOUD user to adapt fine-grained, user-specific security settings for data, computation and communications inside her own U-Cloud