Cloud Federation – Understanding its Characteristics, Models & Challenges: A Survey

Abstract

In current scenario cloud is a common terminology known to one and all but has different meanings for different people.The market for Cloud Service Providers (CSP) has witnessed enormous growth over the years. This has led to a multiple ways of cloud deployment options. Adapting Cloud computing services amounts to paradigm shift for any organization migrating from legacy on premises model, to hosting on servers, to hosting on cloud.This survey paper is targeted towards a better understanding of existing cloud deployment offerings, challenges of operating as a single vendor cloud model, the evolutionof cloud federation & alignment of cloud services according to customer requirement. The decision to select any deployment is essentially based on cost, resource availability, performance, data security & time to implement. These issues are addressed in this survey paper by referring to earlier work done in last ten years in the cloud computing domain. This paper will support decision making of any user seeking cloud services to understand various options of cloud deployments and what form of deployment is a right fit for hosting their business applications in cloud.