Large-Scale Context Provisioning: A Use-Case for Homogenous Cloud Federation

The ability to seamlessly bridge clouds across organisational and administrative boundaries will play a vital role in establishing the utility of cloud computing for large-scale collaborative processes. Managing human and environmental contexts across geographical, network and administrative boundaries is a process that can benefit from a federation of cloud platforms. In the absence of a mature standard that defines access, control, management and coordination mechanisms between clouds in a federation, we explore these issues through a use-case of managing the dissemination and consumption of contextual information. The use-case is driven by the deployment of a broker-based context provisioning system, for homogenous cloud deployments that reside in different administrative domains. The discussion is driven by the aim to highlight key issues and challenges for enabling cloud federation for large-scale context provisioning, which forms the main contribution of this article.