Understanding decentralized and dynamic brokerage in federated cloud environments

The advent of the cloud computing paradigm offers different ways both to sell services and to exploit external computational resources according to a pay-per-use economic model. Nowadays, cloud computing clients can buy various form of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS from cloud providers. Besides this form of pay-per-use, the perspective of cloud federation offers further business opportunities for small/medium providers which hold physical datacenters. Considering the cloud computing ecosystem, besides large cloud providers, smaller ones are also becoming popular even though their own virtualization infrastructures (i.e., deployed in their datacenters) cannot directly compete with the bigger market leaders. The result is that often small/medium clouds have to exploit the services of mega-providers in order to develop their business logic and their cloud-based services. To this regard, a possible future alternative scenario is represented by the promotion of cooperation among small/medium cloud providers, thus enabling the sharing of computational and storage resources. However, in order to achieve such an environment, several issues have to be addressed. One of these challenges is how to plan brokerage strategies allowing cloud providers to discover other providers for partnership establishment. This chapter focuses on different possible centralized and decentralized approaches in designing a brokerage strategy for cloud federation, analyzing their features, advantages and disadvantages. © 2012, IGI Global.