From Mini-clouds to Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has many definitions with different views within industry and academia, but everybody agrees on that cloud computing is the way of making possible the dream of unlimited computing power with high availability. However, being a cloud computing provider seems to be reserved to very large companies that can achieve having a huge data center. The rest of the companies and institutions have to play the role of cloud users. We propose an architecture to organize a set of mini-clouds provided by different institutions, in order to provide a larger cloud that appears to its users as a single one. Such architecture requires self-managing behaviour in order to deal with the complexity of matching cloud users requests with the computing utility that mini-clouds of institutions can offer.