Next Generation Clouds, The Chameleon Cloud Testbed, and Software Defined Networking (SDN)

Next generation clouds, based on highly programmable, high performance networks, especially those supported by Software-Defined-Networking (SDN) have attracted significant interest by research communities. In recognition of the increasing importance of advancing cloud services and technologies, especially for providing Internet services, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) established a project, the NSFCloud initiative, to enable the computer science research community to develop and experiment with novel cloud architectures and create new, architecturally enabled innovative applications for cloud computing through empirical research experimentation by using large scale distributed cloud testbeds. This paper provides an overview of one of those testbeds, the Chameleon Cloud testbed, with an additional description of the integration of that testbed with high programmable, high performance networks, based on SDN. The Chameleon project is designing, deploying, and operating a large scale, highly distributed experimental environment for empirical cloud research, integrated with high programmable networks as a foundation resource.