5. Federated cloud service management and IoT

Abstract

Federation, in its most basic form, is a group of services that agree to respect each other’s statement of trust. When a user is authenticated in a federated service, every other service in a group will be performed securely. It is the collaboration of several cloud service providers (CSP) to tackle the emerging challenges of cloud computing environments such as load balancing, security, scheduling, and accommodation spikes. The federated cloud associates the local infrastructure providers to a global forum, which enables every stakeholder on-demand self-service. As a service provider, permission is granted to access the resources globally on a remarkable scale. If the end user requires scale-up services on runtime, it just buys the capacity required by the end user from the global marketplace. The meaning of a federated cloud is that the customer can host their applications on the cloud service provider’s platform of choice with proper service-level agreements (SLA). They do not have to rely only on the prominent providers available in the marketplace who are nowadays imposing SLA of their choice and forcing the customer to pay a higher price of their own choice by establishing their monopoly. The advent of both the Internet of things (IoT) and cloud computing are renovating the way of apprehending information technology. IoT cloud is an emerging type of distributed system, that is, consists of a network of sensor-enabled edge devices interconnected with a remote server, such as fog cloud, which provides several infrastructures, software, and platform through the remote network of fog and edge computing which is providing IoT as a Service (IoTaaS). IoT platform mostly focused on collecting data from smart devices through sensors and actuators and analyzes the collected data to get the desired information. According to the requirement of today’s world, the IoT cloud platform must be able to handle the heterogeneity of the data and infrastructure in the dynamic environment. At the same time, it must be secure, robust, and scalable. Automation and smart behavior of the sensors are required to be integrated in the future. The automatic smart responses of the edge devices are required by the CSP to analyze the data on the cloud platform. So, it is required to integrate those IoT networks which are having a limited number of infrastructure and processing speed that can provide secure, scalable, on-demand self-computing, and storage resources. This can be achieved by connecting the IoT network with the cloud network by federating the networks. IoT cloud federation is a lattice of IoT network linked with interconnected CSPs to provide a global disperse network of sensing and actuating environments whereas the functionalities are performed based on protocols in a universal environment. Several medium and large-scale IoT networks are collaborating with CSP in a federated environment to enhance their capabilities like smart sensing and intelligent behavior. Federated IoT CSP are allowing end users to deploy their edge IoT devices on different geographical regions and providing the IoTaaS.