Collaboration Interface for Network Services Invocation by Cloud Management Systems

Cloud services are located on one or several centralized Data Centers and customers access these services remotely. In current deployments, the selection of a cloud service instance to serve a particular customer request is performed without involving the network operator. In this paper, we advocate the collaboration between the Cloud Management System (CMS) and network operators via an open interface, where the CMS can request dynamically to access network performance information and to instantiate and configure network services. This cooperation allows cloud services that offer elastic provision of processing and storage resources following the actual demand to also adapt to the dynamic status of the network and to dynamically instantiate network resources when and where needed. This paper presents this interface, a list of possible network services and a scenario illustrating a seamless VM migration at a testbed environment that highlights the benefits of our approach. Keyworkds: Cloud networking; network-cloud cooperation; open interface; network services; CINA; ALTO