Today OpenStack is a widely used open source cloud infrastructure. Currently OpenStack is a strictly private cloud without federation features with other tenants or other clouds like Amazon EC2, etc. As the presence of OpenStack increases, there is an increased necessity to extend OpenStack to federate within and across clouds. We have designed and implemented a simple and novel framework to facilitate OpenStack as a hybrid cloud. Federation involves associating multiple tenants or clouds to share services and resources and interoperate to benefit from each other. Traditionally brokers have been used to provide such federation features. Our proposal, aims at a simple infrastructure to map other entities like foreign clouds as sub clouds of the primary cloud. We propose a simple framework to federate between clouds and share resources. This framework leverages features and services from the primary cloud and reduces redundancy of tasks. For this we make use of the hierarchical structure provided to Nova by Cells. A child cell of the OpenStack setup is made as an interface to a foreign cloud like Amazon EC2 or another OpenStack cloud. Hence, child cells can be configured to act as foreign cloud interface and can use different API to interface with various clouds or other tenants of same cloud or other cloud instances. Thus, the child cell maps the foreign cloud resources as a part of the primary cloud and the primary cloud looks upon it as an extension of its resources. Management policies that apply to both primary and foreign clouds as well as multiple tenants can be defined in the primary cloud. Hence, all services and resources can be effectively managed from the primary cloud. This framework could be used for a number of used cases like federation between clouds and tenants, bursting from an OpenStack cloud to another OpenStack cloud and bursting from a private OpenStack cloud to public Amazon EC2. Other cloud providers can also provide functionality by creating drivers as this is implemented as a pluggable module. Our talk would explain in depth, the design and implementation of this framework and provide a demo for the above bursting scenarios. For further information on the design, refer our blueprint
