Cloud Control and Management Planes for Service Provisioning

On-demand service provisioning poses stringent time constraints for multiple functions of the cloud provisioning process such as authentication and authorization of users, research of resources to build a service and resource setup. These constraints have to be met in both single and multi-cloud scenarios with clouds cooperating to build and provide a service. In this paper we focus on architectural aspects of the cloud approach for on demand service provisioning. We propose a bi-layer architecture with separated and interworking management and control planes: human intervention and time consuming functions for service negotiation are confined to the management plane while an entirely automated control plane facilitates on-demand provisioning of pre-negotiated services. The architecture opens to design of signaling protocols and algorithms with different time constraints for the two planes. For the proposed architecture we introduce models for secure access and resource discovery as well as an XML-based framework for its information system.