An Architecture for Community Clouds Using Concepts of the Intercloud

When cooperating enterprises want to build a community cloud and don't want to burden only a single partner with the provisioning of the cloud infrastructure, they need an architecture that combines the cloud resources from different sites to form a single community cloud. While the idea is similar to grid computing the control over how the resources are used does not stay with the site, but is transferred to the user. Assuming that the IT infrastructures of the enterprises at least partly evolve towards a private cloud, the challenges we face become similar to those posed by the Intercloud. The architecture we present in this paper shows how clouds from different administrative domains can be linked together in a secure way. We also present a policy mechanism that allows users to control how their applications are distributed among the distributed architecture. This way it is possible to scale out parts of a distributed application, while other sensitive parts remain in the local cloud.