I-Corps: Networked Federated Infrastructure-as-a-Service

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project lies in introducing a novel disruptive idea into the market of IT cloud services - the idea that clouds can be created bottom up instead of top-down. The approach democratizes the market for cloud infrastructure services by allowing many small and medium providers to create federations of clouds that can rival the size of current monolithic vertically integrated public cloud offerings available from large corporations in this space. Considering the extent to which modern life depends on cloud services today, this idea can have a profoundly disruptive influence on the existing cloud marketplace, the evolution of the associated enabling technologies and how we interact with the day-to-day technologies surrounding us. If successful, this project will help create novel solutions that enable new types of businesses and services dependent on the dynamic, deeply interconnected cloud infrastructure seamlessly linking together people, environmental, health and other monitoring devices, scientific instruments, industrial equipment, data storage and processing facilities.

This I-Corps project explores the commercial potential of a distributed architecture of software control agents implementing the cloud resource management algorithms. This is the extensible resource description language used to describe cloud infrastructures belonging to different organizations and the management algorithms reasoning over those descriptions in order to instantiate dynamic software-defined infrastructures for individual users based on their needs. The end result of this research is a functioning prototype system which today manages the testbed in support of distributed systems and networking research. This approach to cloud resource management is distributed and federated in nature and highly extensible by being able to easily incorporate and support new cloud providers and new cloud resources. It is markedly different from the existing commercial and open-source cloud solutions which are centralized, siloed and only able to work with like technologies.