Creating a Sustainable Federation of Cloud-Based Infrastructures for the Future Internet - The FIWARE Approach

The remarkable success of cloud computing has change the way services and applications are implemented and offered not least because of the flexibility and scalability that such an environment can offer. Cloud federation has tremendous potential for the industry as an effective way to increase the capacity of resources and diversity of offerings while keeping costs relatively low. Yet cloud federation is still in its infancy, with different approaches being introduced, either in terms of architectural design or the availability of test facilities. This paper introduces the FIWARE approach for federating multiple cloud-based infrastructures targeting different fields related to Future Internet and Smart-Cities innovative developments. Sustainability is considered in the focus of our approach. In addition to the traditional cloud services, the FIWARE federation mainly offers a set of general-purpose platform functions and services that are available through open (public and royalty-free), vendor-independent APIs supporting open innovation and extended with further facilities (e.g. sensing and Software-Defined-Networking (SDN) capabilities) advancing the market with smart infrastructures. We present federated infrastructure sustainability considerations along with the FIWARE federation architecture design that is implemented and deployed within a federation of 17 cloud-based infrastructures distributed across Europe