Organization of Dagstuhl Seminar on “Federated Cloud Infrastructures”

I will co-organise a Dagstuhl Seminar on Federated Cloud Infrastructures. I initiated this seminar to put additional focus on the security and interoperability challenges of connecting multiple clouds. This this topic is also addressed by my TClouds Project, this seminar aims at creating a broader scientific community discussing these challenges.

The organisers of this seminar are:

• Matthias Schunter (IBM Research – Zürich, CH)
• Marc Shapiro (UPMC – Paris, FR)
• Paulo Verissimo (University of Lisboa, PT)
• Michael Waidner (Fraunhofer SIT – Darmstadt, DE)
• Rüdiger Kapitza (Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, DE)

The seminar is invitation only and nearly fully booked. If you are interested in being invited, please send me your CV and a short note on your expertise and your potential contributions.
We will then consider you when distributing the remaining seats (no guarantees though).

Abstract
Computing services are increasingly pooled within global utility computing
infrastructures offered by providers such as IBM, Google and Amazon.
Infrastructure clouds provide virtual machines and resources. These
infrastructure clouds are used to enable “platforms as a service” that simplify
implementation of arbitrary scalable services.
Management and protection of individual clouds is hard and focus of
current research (Seminar Nr. 11491 in 2011), the emerging federation of
individual clouds into a cloud-of-clouds infrastructure poses new research
questions in order to allow hosting of critical workloads.
The proposed seminar will address this trend towards cloud federation
by bringing together researchers from systems management, security, and
dependability. We believe that only such an integrated approach is able to
guarantee security and dependability while preserving the essential cost and
efficiency benefits of today’s emerging solutions.
The challenge to address is how to provide secure and dependable services
on such federated cloud platforms. Selected research questions are:
How can clouds securely interoperate, how can service availability be guaranteed
despite failures or attacks by individual clouds, how can existing algorithms
be adjusted to provide scalable eventual consistency, how can workloads
be safely migrated between clouds, and finally whether cloud-of-cloud
infrastructures can provide such benefits at costs that are competitive with
single cloud solutions.