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dard that describes the interfaces between the func-
tions and layers described in the framework.
5 CASES
This section discusses two cases where standardiza-
tion of the intercloud would be very beneficial.
5.1 Early Warning Systems
Early Warning Systems (EWS) provide a technolog-
ical alternative to human survaillance on critical in-
frastructures like dikes and bridges. These systems
take sensor data from the monitored infrastructure,
analyse the data and report to other information sys-
tems or people about the state of the infrastructure,
see figure 3.
During normal operation of an EWS, i.e. there is
nothing wrong with the infrastructure, not much com-
puting capacity is needed to run the analysis. How-
ever, if things are about to go wrong, e.g. the EWS
thinks a dike section will break soon, a lot more com-
puting capacity is needed. This capacity is needed
for instance to simulate the water flowing through the
dike section and into the urban area behind it.
An EWS is therefore a very good candidate for
cloud computing. It would be very inefficient to have
this much computing capacity standing by just in case
something goes wrong with the monitored infrastruc-
ture. However, there is a risk in using a single cloud
provider for such an important IT system as an EWS,
which may warrant the extra cost involved in set-
ting up dedicated computing capacity. The intercloud
would solve this dilemma, because it allows for very
fast switching of providers if something goes wrong
with one of them.
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Figure 3: Early Warning System (EWS).
5.2 Dynamic CDNs
Content Delivery Networks (CDN) are widely used to
distribute content to users. In a CDN, content is dis-
tributed to several nodes owned by the CDN operator.
If a user requests this content, he is redirected to a
node that is able to provide the content in a fast and
efficient way, e.g. the one that is close to him and not
at maximum capacity yet.
A CDN could be distributed even more if the
nodes do not have to be owned by the CDN opera-
tor itself. If the CDN node is actually a virtual ma-
chine that can be easily transferred from one cloud
to another, the node could be placed even closer to
the potential users. For this scenario to work well, it
is necessary to have many potential locations for the
nodes. The intercloud would be able to provide this.
6 CONCLUSIONS
This paper discussed the current state of cloud com-
puting and showed that it is comparable to the state
of networks before the internet. Clouds need to be
connected more to make it easier for users to switch
between providers and at the same time make it eas-
ier for providers to supply ”infinite resources”. Two
cases were presented that would benefit from the in-
tercloud: early warning systems and dynamic content
delivery networks.
At the moment the big cloud providers do not feel
the need to standardize this intercloud and there is no
authorative body that sets the standard. It is necessary
for the IETF to take its current effort to create a cloud
reference framework one step further and standard-
ize the interfaces between the functions and layers as
well.
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THE IETF SHOULD CREATE AN INTERCLOUD RFC - The Interfaces in the IETF Cloud Reference Framework should
be Standardized
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