CLEVER: A cloud-enabled virtual environment

A cloud-enabled virtual environment called CLEVER is proposed in this paper. CLEVER simplifies the access management of private/hybrid clouds and provides simple and easily accessible interfaces to interact with different “interconnected” clouds, deploy Virtual Machines and perform load balancing through migration. The concept of interface is also exploited for integrating security, contextualization, VM disk image management and federation functionalities made available from higher level software components. Due to its pluggable design, CLEVER is able to grant high scalability, modularity and flexibility in the middleware architecture, while fault tolerance requirements are also satisfied. A prototype version of CLEVER has been developed to implement and test its main features, as discussed in the final part the paper.