Cloud Federation: Effects of Federated Compute Resources on Quality of Service and Cost*

Cloud Federation is one concept to confront challenges that still persist in Cloud Computing, such as vendor lock-in or compliance requirements. The lack of a standardized meaning for the term Cloud Federation has led to multiple conflicting definitions and an unclear prospect of its possible benefits. Taking a client-side perspective on federated compute services, we analyse how choosing a certain federation strategy affects Quality of Service and cost of the resulting service or application. Based on a use case, we experimentally prove our analysis to be correct and describe the different trade-offs that exist within each of the strategies.