Federated Cloud Services using Virtual API Proxy Layer in a Distributed Cloud Environment

There is a Global Shift happening in the IT industries, many enterprises are moving towards the hybrid cloud environment which offers benefits such as high availability and auto scaling in their IT Infrastructure. Proprietary solutions exist from many Cloud Service Providers but they also come with vendor lock-in and portability issues. In this paper, we show our approach to federate OpenStack cloud with other clouds by developing a Virtual API Proxy Layer that maps other clouds (Azure, AWS, VMware, OpenStack) into a pseudo availability zone in OpenStack cloud. we take into consideration that most of the clouds provide OpenStack APIs (sometimes by third-party solutions) which makes OpenStack APIs de facto standard. Our intention in this paper is make Federated Cloud Services Framework part of OpenStack core which will allow federation between OpenStack and other clouds.