Cloud Computing builds on the latest achievements of diverse research areas, such as Grid Computing, Service-oriented computing, business process modeling and virtualization. As this new computing paradigm was mostly lead by companies, several proprietary systems arose. Recently, alongside these commercial systems, several smaller-scale privately owned systems are maintained and developed. This chapter focuses on issues faced by users with interests in Multi-Cloud use and by Cloud providers with highly dynamic workloads. The authors propose a Federated Cloud Management architecture that provides unified access to a federated Cloud that aggregates multiple heterogeneous IaaS Cloud providers in a transparent manner. The architecture incorporates the concepts of meta-brokering, Cloud brokering, and on-demand service deployment. The meta-brokering component provides transparent service execution for the users by allowing the interconnection of various Cloud brokering solutions. Cloud-Brokers manage the number and the location of the Virtual Machines performing the user requests. In order to decrease Virtual Machine instantiation time and increase dynamism in the system, the service deployment component optimizes service delivery by encapsulating services as virtual appliances allowing their decomposition and replication among IaaS Cloud infrastructures. The architecture achieves service provider level transparency through automatic virtual appliance replication and Virtual Machine management of Cloud-Brokers.
Towards Efficient Virtual Appliance Delivery with Minimal Manageable Virtual Appliances