Distributed cloud services based on programmable agile networks

Abstract

In order to allow researchers to focus on their work, all newly designed applications and services must not only offer features needed to tackle Big Data problems, but need to work seamlessly and intuitively, while efficiently hiding all non-necessary technical and networking details from the end user. Thus, today’s requirements of the research and education community demand a holistic converged approach in the design of new generation intelligent cloud aware networks that need to work in concert with the distributed application components. The goal of this paper is to contribute toward setting up the building blocks of an open multi-cloud ecosystem based on a programmable cloud service delivery infrastructure. For these purposes we examine the possibility of introducing a third-party multi-cloud marketplace placed on top of a cloud aware agile network that can be reconfigured based on the defined multi-cloud application workflow. We discuss the overall architecture of the ecosystem and define the requirements for the underlying network infrastructure. The described proof of concept demonstrates the benefits of the proposed solution providing an example of how the concepts of network function virtualization and software defined networks can be leveraged in order to obtain an agile programmable network that will respond to the changes in the application traffic flow. With self-provisioning being acknowledged as a crucial component among service providers, we discuss all steps needed in order to translate user requests in a fully automated end-to-end service delivery and monitoring especially in a multi-domain environment.