JointCloud: A Cross-Cloud Cooperation Architecture for Integrated Internet Service Customization

Cloud computing has completely changed the economics of IT industry. Recently, the new form of "shared global economy" requires cloud services to be collaboratively provisioned by different cloud providers in a Geo-distributed manner, which brings severe challenges in service performance and cost. To address this problem, in this paper we propose JointCloud, a cross-cloud cooperation architecture for integrated Internet service customization. JointCloud borrows the idea from airline alliances and aims at empowering the cooperation among multiple clouds to provide efficient cross-cloud services. Joint Cloud focuses not only on the vertical integration of cloud resources but also on the horizontal cooperation among different cloud vendors. This paper describes the concept and architecture of JointCloud, as well as the initial design of the key components, namely, communication, storage, and computation.