Secure Orchestration Based Federation in Hybrid Cloud Environments

The IT industry is experiencing a global shift towards computing in hybrid cloud environments - the primary impetus for this shift being cost and scalability. The three models of cloud computing (public, private and hybrid) are realizations of the trade-offs made between the core factors, varying per utility. Among the three, a Hybrid cloud model offers the greatest flexibility for the desired balance between cost and scaling. To that end, this paper proposes a hybrid cloud solution on OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform. The solution utilizes OpenStack´s concept of availability zones to offer a choice between performing cloud federation at will or as per pre-defined resource policies. Cloud federation is secured by integrating the federation authentication with OpenStack´s built in security/authentication module, keystone. Testing and implementation has been performed for OpenStack to OpenStack federation within a data center and the results can be extended to public cloud providers (e.g.:-Amazon´s AWS, Rack space).