ZeroTouch Provisioning (ZTP) Model and Infrastructure Components for Multi-provider Cloud Services Provisioning

This paper presents results of the ongoing development of the Cloud Services Delivery Infrastructure (CSDI) that provides a basis for infrastructure centric cloud services provisioning, operation and management in multi-cloud multi-provider environment defined as a Zero Touch Provisioning, Operation and Management (ZTP/ZTPOM) model. The presented work refers to use cases from data intensive research that require high performance computation resources and large storage volumes that are typically distributed between datacenters often involving multiple cloud providers. Automation for large scale scientific (and industrial) applications should include provisioning of both inter-cloud network infrastructure and intra-cloud application resources. It should provide support for the complete application operation workflow together with the possible application infrastructure and resources changes that can occur during the application lifecycle. The authors investigate existing technologies for automation of the service provisioning and management processes aiming to cross-pollinate best practices from currently disconnected domains such as cloud based applications provisioning and multi-domain high-performance network provisioning. The paper refers to the previous and legacy research by authors, the Open Cloud eXchange (OCX), that has been proposed to address the last mile problem in cloud services delivery to campuses over trans-national backbone networks such as GEANT. OCX will serve as an integral component of the prospective ZTP infrastructure over the GEANT network. Another important component, the Marketplace, is defined for providing cloud services and applications discovery (in generally intercloud environment) and may also support additional services such as services composition and trust brokering for establishing customer-provider federations.