On-demand provisioning of Cloud and Grid based infrastructure services for collaborative projects and groups

Effective use of existing network and IT infrastructure can be achieved by providing combined network and IT resources on-demand as infrastructure services that are capable of supporting complex technological processes, scientific experiments, and collaborative groups of researchers and applications. This paper provides a short overview of existing standards and technologies and refers to ongoing projects. We also describe experiences in developing an architectural framework and tools for combined on-demand network and Grid/Cloud service provisioning. The paper proposes an architectural framework for on-demand infrastructure service provisioning comprising of three main components: the Composable Services Architecture (CSA) that intends to provide a conceptual and methodological framework for developing dynamically configurable virtualised infrastructure services; the Infrastructure Services Modeling Framework (ISMF) that provides a basis for the infrastructure resources virtualisation and management, including description, discovery, modeling, composition and monitoring; and the Service Delivery Framework (SDF) that provides a basis for defining the whole composable services life cycle management and supporting infrastructure services. We discuss implementation suggestions for the defined architectural components and provides information about the ongoing developments of the GEMBus which is considered as a middleware framework for CSA.