Cloud Interoperability, Portability and Federation

Arjun Joshi1, Poovannan.E2

Department of Computer Science, Coimbatore Institute of Technology.
Coimbatore-641014, India.
1
[email protected]
2
[email protected]

Abstract— Cloud computing means to separating applications Vendor lock in makes the consumers or cloud users unable to
from the operating system and operating system from the switch among cloud providers based on their changing needs
underlying hardware. This separation enables every organization or on their quality issues. It is because organizations built
to implement their own way of virtualization enabled cloud cloud environment without considering the need for
system. Since there are large numbers of cloud service provider,
interoperability. Competition between the big vendors, like
everyone have their own way of implementation of how user
application interacts with their cloud. Thus interoperability Amazon, Google, SalesForce, Savvis etc. makes them
between clouds has gained significant importance in cloud reluctant to agree on widely accepted standards promoting
computing. Open API’s, protocols and standards are the key their own, incompatible formats hence the customers are
elements to achieve cloud interoperability. Interoperability in forced to get service from a particular provider. There are
general means to ability of diverse system and organizations to many approaches addressing interoperability at higher level
work together. Cloud Interoperability enables a global cloud like Cloud Broker, Enterprise Cloud Orchestration Platform
computing ecosystem whereby organizations are able to /Orchestration layer and one abstract API to rule all other
seamlessly work together for the purpose of wider industry APIs.
adoption of cloud computing technology and related issues.
Cloud service providers must understand the evolution of
Moreover the customers do not want to be locked-in in a single
cloud provider and hence cloud service providers must exchange cloud service scenarios and provide changes to actually move
information and their interfaces should be completely systems between cloud locations. There should be standards
understood by all. for packaging and transferring of cloud system with reliability
This paper discusses about various interoperability issues and and minimal amount of changes in configuration.
solutions proposed by various organizations working on cloud Clouds interoperate with each other to meet the needs of
interoperability, portability and federation along with a case client applications using infrastructure, platforms or services
study on Deltacloud API. coming from different Cloud service providers. This ensures
elasticity and infinite resources availability. Complex business
Keywords— Cloud Computing; Cloud Interoperability; Cloud applications can be implemented with lower cost and
Portability; Cloud Federation; Interoperability Standards; innovative solutions.
Cloud Brokers; Open APIs; Deltacloud. Users wish to move from one provider to competitor in
case if there are changes in their technical requirement and the
1. Introduction current provider is no longer sufficient or provider suddenly
The most simple way to describe the cloud increased the price or contractual terms altered in an
interoperability is by its most used mottos like ―avoid vendor unfavorable way. Cloud interoperability includes process
lock-in‖, ‖develop your application one, deploy execution, security, portability, migration, standards,
anywhere‖, ‖enable hybrid clouds‖, or even ―one API to rule transparency, and manageability and regulatory compliance.
them all‖. A cloud subscriber does not want to get locked to a There are two main dimensions to cloud computing
particular service provider (Vendor lock in) [1]. They would interoperability: vertical and horizontal. The vertical
like to switch to any cloud service provider based on service dimension deals with interoperability within the same
cost, performance, capabilities and coping with current company‘s cloud platform, but across different devices and
technology. So to make this feasible the various hypervisor applications that an end-user might rely on to access the
platforms and virtual machines involved need to be information stored by that cloud provider. For example, Gmail
interoperable and enabling portability, leveraging defined service can be accessed via mobile phone or laptop or tablets
industry standards. Once interoperability is achieved, etc. The horizontal dimension describes interoperability
migration of the data, applications from one Cloud Computing among different cloud providers. Horizontal interoperability
environment to another becomes easier. Cloud interoperability would also lead to users leave one provider service to another
and portability are emerging and on demand topic for future based on their needs. For example, an organization that hosts
cloud environment. its application on Amazon‘s cloud service for its business can
Also, one cloud service provider may not be able to easily switch to a competitor‘s cloud service in search of
satisfy subscriber‘s request since there is limitation on lower costs or more favorable terms of service. Horizontal
resources, space and cost. Cloud vendor suffers from resource interoperability also ensures users to make use of multiple
exhaustion when they provide many infrastructure offerings. service providers seamlessly and efficiently. Since different

This paper appeared in the Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Advances in Cloud Computing (ACC-2013),
September 19-20, 2013 Bangalore, India organized by Computer Society of India.
cloud providers may excel in meeting different areas of user bundled up within the VAA, packages them together and
demand, horizontal interoperability provides business users to allows application to be run on any Windows OS cloud.
get the best out of different providers to serve multiple PaaS: Some degree of application modification is necessary to
applications with unique requirements. achieve portability. Minimizing the amount of application
rewriting should be done while preserving successful data
2. Cloud Portability migration. The problem with PaaS portability is the lack of a
There is common confusion between interoperability and consistent platform definition among PaaS providers.
portability. Cohen [15] clarifies the similarities and the Portability problem can be solved by establishing a platform
differences among these terms: ―Cloud computing reference point. OrangeScape[29] helps building
interoperability is the ability for multiple Cloud providers to comprehensive business applications using visual style
work together or interoperate. Cloud Portability is the ability modeling interface in a 5GL environment. Applications
of data and application components to be easily moved and developed through OrangeScape Studio on browser can be
reused regardless of the provider, operating system, storage, executed on public cloud, private cloud with the help of
format or API‖. According to Lee [14] Interoperability means OrangeScape run-time platform.
―being able to avoid ‗Cloud silos‘ that are non-interoperable IaaS: Portability is evaluated based on the ability to port
since they are built on different APIs, protocols, and software Virtual Machines, storage, communication and the underlying
stacks‖. On the other hand, portability means ―being able to configurations across infrastructure providers.
perceive critical properties, such as performance, numerical
stability and monitoring‖. 3. Cloud Federation
Interoperability is the successful communication between In order to support worldwide consumers, service
or among systems whereas portability is the ability to use providers have their data centers in multiple geographical
components or systems lying on multiple hardware or locations to provide redundancy and ensure reliability in case
software environments. of site failures. For e.g. Amazon has data centers in different
geographic location and expects customers to express a
The types of portability are classified as follows: preference about the location where they want their
Functional portability: It is the ability to define the application to be hosted. But it is very difficult for Cloud
functionality of application in spite of different platforms. customers to determine in advance the best location for
Open Virtualization Format (OVF) provides a basis for hosting their services as they may not know origin of
portability. OVF specification describes an open, secure, consumers of their services. Cloud SaaS providers may not be
portable, efficient and extensible format for the packaging and able to meet QoS expectations of their service consumers
distribution of software to be run in virtual machines. Virtual originating from multiple geographical locations. In addition,
machine properties can be captured concisely and accurately. no single Cloud infrastructure provider will be able to
OVF does not rely on the use of a specific host platform, establish their data centers at all possible locations throughout
virtualization platform or guest OS. the world. Hence they would like to make use of services of
Data portability: It means to the ability of customer to move multiple Cloud infrastructure service providers who can
business data from one service provider application to another. provide better support for their specific consumer needs. This
Achieving data portability depends on standardization of data necessitates building mechanisms for federation of Cloud
import and export functionality between providers. It is infrastructure service providers for seamless provisioning of
necessary to provide platform independent data services across different Cloud providers.
representations. The key elements for enabling federation of clouds and
Service enhancement: Use metadata added through auto-scaling application services are: Cloud Coordinators,
annotations. Control APIs allow infrastructure to be added, Brokers and an Exchange. Architectural framework and
reconfigured or removed either programmatically or by principles for the development of utility oriented clouds and
human in real time based on traffic or outages etc. their federation has to be framed. Cloud Coordinator is needed
for exporting Cloud services and their management driven by
Requirements of portability across different service models: market based trading and negotiation protocols for optimal
SaaS: This means to application portability i.e. preserving the QoS delivery at minimal cost and energy. A Cloud Broker is
functionality of the initial application and is evaluated based responsible for mediating between service consumers and
on proprietary or open source code, open standard data Cloud coordinators. A Cloud Exchange acts as a market
formats, integration technologies and application server/ maker enabling capability sharing across multiple Cloud
operating system. AppZero[28] works on application domains through its matching making services.
migration. Its approach is to make application independent of Cloud federation makes all cloud vendors to use some
the operational stack up on which it sits. AppZero creates a standardized mechanisms for sharing resources and identity
virtual application appliance (VAA) which is similar to a zip among themselves. In Federated clouds, the providers agree
file. The AppZero platform analyzes the application and each other how to mutually enforce policy and governance,
works out the dependencies and packages that need to be establishing a common trust boundary. Horizontal federation
means two or more cloud providers join to share resources i.e.

This paper appeared in the Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Advances in Cloud Computing (ACC-2013),
September 19-20, 2013 Bangalore, India organized by Computer Society of India.
participants who have excess capacity can share their accessible by other protocols. CDMI provides interoperability
resources, for an agreed-upon price, with participants needing with storage clouds. It defines the functional interface that
additional resources. XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and applications will use to create, retrieve, update and delete data
Presence Protocol) can be used for identifying Cloud just-in- elements from the cloud. CDMI enables moving data from
time and sharing messages between clouds. OASIS‘s SPML one cloud vendor to another without pain of recoding to
(Service Provisioning Markup Language) can be used for user different interfaces.
provisioning, resource sharing. Federation among various The Open Cloud Consortium (OCC) is a member
SaaS offerings within a cloud must be performed using operated organization supporting the development of
OASIS SAML (Simple Assertion Markup Language), reference implementations, benchmarks and standards for
OAUTH, OpenID etc. In the case of deprovisioning also, Cloud computing technology. It helps in managing cloud
cloud vendors must federate among themselves to deprovision infrastructure and cloud computing test beds. Open Cloud
the resources as per requirements. Testbed (OCT) is used to develop new cloud computing
software and infrastructure.
4. Cloud Computing Interoperability Standards Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) [24] aims
Many organizations have come forward in implementing an at standardizing the interactions among cloud providers. It
open API which allows the users to interact with different developed Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI).
cloud providers. Standardizing API is an integration and It targets Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds, and
interoperability problem. Cloud Standards Customer Council addresses cloud management, not functionality. A standard for
providers cloud users with the opportunity to drive client visualization developed by DMTF is Virtualization
requirements into standards development organizations and Management (VMAN), a Building Block for Cloud
deliver best practices and use cases to assist other enterprises. Interoperability which uses OVF for installation and
Some of the cloud standards and organizations working on deployment of virtual appliances across multiple virtualization
them are: platforms.
 OGF Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF) is
 CDMI planning to come up with a global computing ecosystem
 OCC whereby organizations are able to seamlessly work together it
 DMTF developed Unified cloud interface for the unification of
various cloud API‘s. It will use Resource Description
 CCIF
Framework (RDF) for the description of semantic Cloud data
 GICTF
models. It abstracts the usage of any cloud API and unifies
 SNIA them in one layer with the help of semantic web and OWL.
 OMG CompatibleOne is an open source [9] collaborative
 OASIS project based on open standards. It enables cloud service
 ARTS brokerage. CompatibleOne Application Platform Service
 ETSI (COAPS) provides generic API for PaaS.
Global Intercloud Technology Forum (GICTF) promotes
Open Grid Forum (OGF) [13] is an open community standardization of network protocol and interface for inter-
committed to driving the rapid evolution and adoption of cloud management, and to enable the provision of more
applied distributed computing. It stresses that the Cloud reliable cloud services than those available today. IEEE has
community should cover 6 standardization areas in the context introduced two working groups, named P2301 developing a
of Cloud computing interoperability: a) interfaces to IaaS, b) standard that will enable portability and P2302 allowing a
PaaS and deployment model formats for Cloud applications system in one Cloud to work with a system in another cloud.
(e.g. resource descriptions, service and SLA models), c) Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA) works on
management frameworks (e.g. governance and policy cloud storage interoperability to benefit enterprise storage
enforcement and SLA formats), d) portable component clouds. Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI) is promoting the
descriptions (e.g. description of VM‘s), e) data exchange adoption of cloud storage as a new delivery model that
formats (to and from Clouds), f) Cloud taxonomies and provides elastic, on-demand storage billed only for what is
reference models.. OGF publishes OCCI (Open Cloud used.
Computing Interface) [22] which is a standard for IaaS Object Management Group (OMG) works on cloud
resource management, it has evolved from the flexible API standards. Service Oriented Architecture is implemented in
with a strong focus on integration, portability, interoperability clouds. OMG hosts Cloud Standards Customer Council
and innovation while still offering a high degree of (CSCC).
extensibility. Advancing Open Standards for the Information Society
Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) [8] was (OASIS), OASIS Identity in the cloud works to address the
released by Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) security challenges posted by identity management in cloud
is a standardized way to access services from cloud, used to computing. OASIS Cloud Application Management for
manage containers, accounts, security access and
monitoring/billing information, even for storage that is

This paper appeared in the Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Advances in Cloud Computing (ACC-2013),
September 19-20, 2013 Bangalore, India organized by Computer Society of India.
Platforms (CAMP) works on standardizing cloud PaaS offering one entry point for all the Cloud offering (although
management API. they may be incompatible). It is a REST-based API for simple
The Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) any-platform access and it is written in Ruby.
works on cloud interoperability with respect to service Right Scale API is a web based Cloud computing
oriented architecture. management platform servers which act as a bridge between
European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI) application and cloud infrastructure. It facilitates the
created European Commission Communication on Cloud deployment and the management of applications spanning
Computing to identify use cases, protocols and open APIs for multipleCloud infrastructures – private, public, or hybrid.
cloud interoperability. Open Stack API is a free, open-source platform that
service providers can use to offer infrastructure services
5. Approaches to Cloud Interoperability similar to Amazon Web Services' EC2 and S3.This project
The approaches to cloud interoperability can be classified aims to deliver solutions for all types of clouds by being
using (1) cloud brokers (2) open APIs (3) open protocols. simple to implement, massively scalable, and feature rich.
A "Cloud Broker"[26] is an intermediary between cloud OpenNebula API is an open-source Cloud computing
providers and end users that assist companies in choosing the toolkit for managing heterogeneous distributed data center
platform that best suits their needs, assist in the deployment infrastructures. OpenNebula orchestrates storage, network,
and integration of apps across multiple clouds or provide a virtualization, monitoring, and security technologies to deploy
choice of multiple competing services that allow end users the multitier services as virtual machines on distributed
freedom to move between platforms. infrastructures, combining both data center resources and
Unified Cloud Interface (UCI) by Google is a cloud broker. remote Cloud resources, according to allocation policies.
It tries to unify various cloud APIs and abstract it behind an Deltacloud open API makes use of open protocol HTTP
open and standardized cloud interface. It serves as a common to achieve interoperability.
interface for interaction between remote platforms, networks,
systems, applications and services. The actual model 6. Interoperability and Portability Requirements
descriptions are provided by UCI schema and details for The main requirements for cloud interoperability are:
integration with other management models defined by the
Programming: Programming involves moving from one
specification. UCI architecture abstracts the use of any cloud
provider to another with minimal changes to system, common
API and unifies them in one layer. It is done with the help of
set of interfaces, standard API enabling an entity to build
semantic web and OWL.
something once, then use it to monitor and control variety of
The various open APIs available include
platforms, ontology of cloud, high level modelling, a single
 LibCloud
tool to work with multiple cloud providers.
 Simple cloud Application: able to span multiple cloud services, data
 JCloud exchange, data portability, private cloud applications obtain
 Deltacloud resources from public cloud when excess capacity is needed.
 Right ScaleAPI Monitoring: SLA and performance monitoring; SLAs in
 Open Stack API support of governance requirements; delivery on demand,
 OpenNebula API QoS and SLA items to be guaranteed end to end.
Deployment: provision resources from multiple cloud services
LibCloud API is a client library that can handle with a single management tool, enabling a service hosted on
computing resources from diverse Cloud providers. LibCloud one platform to automatically call a service hosted by another.
is supported by the Apache Software Foundation. It allows Authentication, authorization, security: single sign on for
users to manage four different cloud resources such as cloud users accessing multiple clouds, integration of different
Servers, Cloud Storage, Load Balancers as a Service, DNS as security technologies, digital identities, identity federation and
a Service. It is implemented in python. management across vendors.
Simple cloud from IBM, Microsoft, Zend, Nirvanix, Client Requests: In accordance with REST principles, clients
Rackspace and GoGrid supports storage management and is a make requests through HTTP with the usual meanings
PHP API for interacting with blob, table and queue storage assigned to the standard HTTP verbs GET, POST, PUT and
services of several providers. DELETE. Deltacloud follows guidelines in Fedora
Jclouds API is an open source library that helps to get ProjectCloud APIs Rest style guide. REST is defined by four
started in the cloud and utilizes Java development skills. The interface constraints: identification of resources addressable
Jclouds API gives the freedom to use portable abstractions or by URI; manipulation of resources through representations
cloud-specific features. Jclouds tests support of 30 cloud (e.g. XML, JSON, HTML), self descriptive messages and
providers and cloud software stacks including Amazon, HATEOAS (Hypermedia as the engine of application state).
GoGrid, Ninefold, vCloud, OpenStack, and Azure.
Deltacloud API is an API supported by Red Hat, which is 7. Cloud Interoperability Activities
a part of the Apache Software Foundation Incubator. This API Various activities that can be done through Cloud
tries to abstract the differences between diverse Clouds Interoperability are:

This paper appeared in the Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Advances in Cloud Computing (ACC-2013),
September 19-20, 2013 Bangalore, India organized by Computer Society of India.
  Creating, accessing, updating, deleting data in clouds each cloud‘s API. Delta cloud also maintains long term
(cross cloud): CDMI works on database interfaces, stability for scripts, tools and applications along with
standard interfaces to metadata and data objects. backward compatibility across different versions.
 Moving VMs and virtual appliances between clouds In CIMI, machine template is a combination of machine
includes migration, hybrid clouds, recovery and configuration and machine image. Machine configuration is
bursting. Open Virtualization Format (OVF) provides the hardware configuration details of machine. In Deltacloud,
a common virtual machine description format. it is called as hardware profiles. Machine image means to
 Selecting vendor for externally hosted cloud i.e. cost virtual machine. But, all cloud providers, does not have
effective reliable deployment. It means to resource machine template as a combination of both machine
and performance requirement description languages. configuration and machine image. For e.g., In Amazon, we
 Portable tools for monitoring and managing clouds: call machine configuration as Instance types and machine
standard management interfaces to IaaS resources. images. Similarly, in Openstack, we have it as server images
 Moving data between clouds (migration, cross cloud): and flavours. Machine templates can be created using JSON.
standard metadata/data formats for movement, Curl command can be used to create machine template.
vendor mappings between cloud data and standard Machine templates has id mapped to database.
formats. Debugging is easy with the help of debugger gem.
 Single sign on access to multiple clouds: federated Debugger statements can be included in the program. Pry in
identity and authorization. For example, OpenID, ruby is used for easy interactive debugging. Deltacloud also
OAuth. uses nanoc. Nanoc is a simple and flexible static site generator
 Orchestrated processes across clouds and enterprise written in Ruby. Content and output are displayed by nanoc
with autocompile feature. Autocompile updates the changes
systems: standards for APIs and data. Discovering
done in local server to project sitting in github.
cloud resources: description languages for available
Driver programs have exception handling. If the user
resources, catalog interfaces.
wants to launch an instance but have chosen wrong hardware
 Evaluating SLAs and penalties: selection of
profile, the cloud service provider has to throw exception and
appropriate cloud resources, auditing clouds includes
error messages. ―Safely do‖ block in ruby makes it easy in
ensuring regulatory compliance, auditing standards,
case of exception cases and deltacloud handles the exceptions.
verification check lists.
Exception and errors for different cloud providers are written
8. Case Study : Interoperability Through separately with each driver code.
Instances can be created in other cloud using Deltacloud
Deltacloud
API. For e.g. Consider creating an instance in openstack, first
Deltacloud provides a unified interface to address both we need to include openstack ruby gem which communicates
internal and external clouds. It acts as a cloud API adapter. with actual openstack server. When the user gives the
One API speaks with native APIs of cloud service providers. credentials of openstack, a connection request is created. Now,
Thus one API rules all other APIs. It is an apache software the request handler obtained in return can be used for any
foundation top level project. It is written in Ruby using operation (here instance creation).
Sinatra web application framework. It has REST Writing a driver in deltacloud: First, what collections are
(Representational State Transfer) based server and minimal to be supported by driver should be understood. All drivers
effort is needed to configure it. The project is available in are inherited from base driver program. Add a new directory
github repository and can be cloned from it. to driver folder and add a file for driver. Define the methods
Deltacloud provides drivers for growing number of for each collection that the driver supports. The methods, as
popular IaaS cloud providers. Deltacloud is an open project, well as the routes to them, are defined in
anybody can contribute it in many ways of documentation, deltacloud/server/lib/deltacloud/server.rb.
sending patch, writing a driver for provider, reporting bugs, Drivers can communicate with cloud provider either
testing or proposing new ideas. Deltacloud HTML interface is through external ruby gems or implementing clients for
written with the jQuery mobileframework, so it is compatible communication. After implementation of some of the methods
with mobile or tablet devices. The below figure describes the for the driver, it should be tested. We need to create yaml file
architecture of Deltacloud. Deltacloud communicates with so that deltacloud recognizes the driver. Drop the yaml file to
native APIs of all the clouds and displays details to cloud /deltacloud/server/config/drivers.
service client. Tests should be added for every new feature. The two test
The project has implemented DMTF CIMI (Cloud directories are /deltacloud/server/tests and /deltacloud/tests.
Infrastructure Management Interface) as front end in addition Specific driver tests can be invoked by commands. Now in
to delta cloud front end. CIMI is widely accepted by all major implementation method, get a handle by passing credentials of
vendors. Delta cloud API helps in controlling cloud services. cloud provider.
For e.g. User can start an instance in internal cloud and can Views in deltacloud can be XML, JSON or HTML
also start instance in amazon ec2 with the same code. For depending on what the client has requested. ―respond_to‖ is a
every cloud provider there is a driver speaking that cloud Sinatra helper to display or invoke the requested view to user.
provider‘s native API, freeing from dealing with particulars of

This paper appeared in the Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Advances in Cloud Computing (ACC-2013),
September 19-20, 2013 Bangalore, India organized by Computer Society of India.
Separate directory for views has view code for different We can get a list of all images, get details of an image or
collections (buckets, hardware profiles, images, instance states create/delete an image.
etc). HAML (HTML abstraction markup language) and XML Instance states: It represents the instance life cycle. At any
views are based on ―respond to‖ helper. For JSON view, hash time instance is in one of states: start, pending, running,
methods are defined. stopped, shutting down, finished.
Server has gemspec file including gems details. VCR is a Keys: They represent the credentials used to access a running
library that is able to record HTTP network traffic over the instance. Keys can be RSA key or username and password.
wire and then replay those requests locally. It is used to record The key type is determined by the back-end cloud provider.
tests of deltacloud. The tests include checking the return User can get a list of all keys, get the description of a key or
values of requests by cloud provider, object type of attributes create/delete a key.
returned. Storage volume: A virtual storage device that can be attached
The deltacloud server is stateless and does not keep any to an instance and mounted by the OS.
information about the current client. The deltacloud server Storage snapshot: These are copies, snapshots of a storage
does not store the credentials for the back-end cloud which the volume at a specified time.
server is talking to. Server uses HTTP basic authentication Bucket: A container for data blobs.
and client have to send the username/password for the back- Blob: A generic binary data item that exists within a specified
end cloud on every request. The specification of what needs to bucket (an object in Amazon S3).
be sent varies from cloud to cloud. For example, Amazon uses Address: It represents an IP address. Depending on the back-
access key id and secret access key for API access. Details on end cloud provider, address can be public or private. Public
credentials are provided in deltacloud site. address represents a unique, globally routable IP address,
private address represents an address routable only within a
private network. In Amazon, IP address management
corresponds to ‗Elastic IP‘ feature. The address collection
supports these operations:
 Creating an address
 Destroying an address
 Associating an address with a running instance
 Disassociating an address from a running instance.
Load balancer: It allows a distribution of ingress network
traffic received by a specified IP address to a number of
Fig. 1 Deltacloud Architecture
instances. Each load balancer has
 A list of instances
 A public address representing the IP address that the
The following terms describe abstractions used in the Apache balancer will respond on to client requests.
Deltacloud API.  A created_at timestamp and
Realms: A distinct organizational unit within the backend  A list of listeners.
cloud. A realm represents a boundary containing resources, Firewalls: Set of rules that govern the accessibility of a
such as a data center. For example, a data center. A realm may running instance over the public internet. In Amazon, it refers
does not necessarily represent the geographical location of to security groups. A firewall has three attributes:
compute resources. To list all realms available, user calls GET
 A name
/api/realms.
 A description
Instances: It is the core of all cloud computing activity. A
realized virtual server, running in a given back-end cloud. An  An owner id
instance is created from an image, with a specific hardware  Set of rules
profile and in a given realm. User can get a list of all instances, Through firewalls, user can get a list of all firewalls, get
get details of an instance, launch an action or create a new details of a firewall, create/delete a firewall, create or delete a
instance. firewall rule.
Images: Templates (virtual machine images) from which Metrics: This collection provides useful information about the
instances are created i.e. they are used to launch instances. cloud resources. E.g. CPU utilization or network throughput.
Each image defines the root partition and initial storage for the It is helpful for developers in better scaling and monitoring.
instance operating system. Image has following attributes: Hardware Profiles: It describes the size of a virtual machine
 A human readable name in a cloud and specifies details such as how many virtual
CPUs, how much memory or how much storage an instance
 A description
might have. While creating instance, a client specifies the
 An owner id
hardware profile on which the instance is based. To list all
 An architecture hardware profiles available with the cloud, user calls
 A state GET/api/hardware_profiles. For example, Amazon

This paper appeared in the Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Advances in Cloud Computing (ACC-2013),
September 19-20, 2013 Bangalore, India organized by Computer Society of India.
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and OpenStack. Our future work is to write driver for [12] P. Goyal, "Enterprise Usability of Cloud Computing Environments:
Issues and Challenges," in Proceedings of the 19th IEEE International
CloudStack and test it and contribute to cloud interoperability. Workshop on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructures for Collaborative
The ideology of DeltaCloud to abstract the cloud services and Enterprises (WETICE) Larisa, Greece, 2010.
control them from an upper hierarchy design can be [13] OGF, "Cloudscape II, Advances in European eInfrastructures, Position
considered for practical work. Papers & Profiles," in DOI:
http://www.ogfeurope.eu/Repository/FileScaricati/Cloudscape_II_Positi
Further work can also be done in improvement of user on_Papers_and_Professional_Profiles.pdf, 2010.
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459.
[15] R.Cohen, "Examining Cloud Compatibility, Portability and
Arjun Joshi did his B.Tech in C.S.E. from G. B. Pant Interoperability," in ElasticVapor: Life in the Cloud, DOI:
Engineering College, Pauri in 2012. He is currently pursuing http://www.elasticvapor.com/2009/02/examining-
cloudcompatibility.html, 2009.
M.E. degree in C.S.E. from Coimbatore Institute of [16] libcloud, in DOI: http://incubator.apache.org/libcloud/, 2010.
Technology, Coimbatore. His research interests include [17] RightScale, "RightScale Cloud Management Features," in DOI:
Mobile and Cloud Computing, Data Engineering and Social http://www.rightscale.com/ products/features/, 2011.
Network Analysis. [18] OpenStack, in DOI: http://www.openstack.org/index.php.
[19] OpenNebula, "OpenNebula 2.0 Architecture," in DOI:
Poovannan.E did his B.E in C.S.E. from Mepco Schlenk http://www.opennebula.org/documentation:rel2.0:architecture, 2011.
Engineering College, Sivakasi in 2011. After working in [20] Cloud Interoperability and Portability with
Cognizant for a year he went back into academics and is OpenNebula ‖http://blog.opennebula.org/ ?p=593‖
currently pursuing M.E. degree in C.S.E. from Coimbatore [21] Grid Forum ―http://www.gridforum.org/‖
[22] OCCI ―http://occi-wg.org/‖
Institute of Technology, Coimbatore. His research interests [23] OCC ―http://opencloudconsortium.org/‖
include Big Data Analysis and Cloud Computing. [24] DMTF ―http://www.dmtf.org/‖
[25] http://www.cloudforum.org/
Acknowledgment [26] http://www.ltech.com/cloud/cloud-brokers
[27] http://www.jclouds.org/documentation
We wish to acknowledge Apache Software Foundation [28] http://www.appzero.com
for providing Deltacloud and several other open source [29] http://www.orangescape.com
softwares. We would also like to express our special thanks of [30] http://elithecomputerguy.com
gratitude to our professor Dr. G. Kousalya, for it was her
vision and guidance that has led us to such knowledge.

This paper appeared in the Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Advances in Cloud Computing (ACC-2013),
September 19-20, 2013 Bangalore, India organized by Computer Society of India.