Discovering Resources in Federated Clouds with Millions of Nodes: The SwarmCloud Approach

Cloud Computing offers a way to outsource IT infrastructure and thereby reduce costs, especially for SMEs. However, companies remain skeptical of using the clouds of foreign organizations because of privacy and security concerns. Due to lack of experience and a too high up-front investment, companies also restrain from setting up their own cloud.

The SwarmCloud project aims at creating a swarm-like network of cloud blocks that can cooperate in a decentralized manner. Each block is a minimal cloud system that is easily affordable for small companies. The SwarmCloud network automatically connects several blocks to form a federated higherlevel cloud system. Scaling such a network to millions of blocks requires a novel decentralized approach to network coordination and resource discovery.

This paper proposes and evaluates a scalable network structure for the SwarmCloud network that leverages peer-to-peer paradigms to build swarms of millions of blocks.