FCFA: A semantic-based federated cloud framework architecture

Cloud Computing is a paradigm that applies a service model on infrastructures, platforms and software. In the last few years, this new idea has been showing its potentials and how, in the long run, it will affect Information Technology and the act of interfacing to computation and storage. This article introduces the FCFA project, a framework for an ontology-based resource life-cycle management and provisioning in a federated Cloud Computing infrastructure. Federated Clouds are presumably the first step toward a Cloud 2.0 scenario where different providers will be able to share their assets in order to create a free and open Cloud Computing marketplace. The contribution of this article is a redesign of a Cloud Computing infrastructure architecture from the ground-up, leveraging semantic web technologies and natively supporting a federated resource provisioning.