The true driving force for the creation of a federation of clouds is a few
fundamental characteristics, including the variety of infrastructures, interfaces, and
different aims. The federation must ensure the application of certain standards and
interfaces that allow secure and effective communication across heterogeneous entities
in order to ensure seamless and helpful interaction between diverse components or
entities of the various cloud providers. The federation has many commercial, legal, and
technical aspects to focus on. Major features like resource provisioning, security,
monitoring, etc. are suggested differently in various types of federations. This chapter
analyzes a number of federation architectures on various important parameters with a
view to highlighting their effect on participating cloud providers. Aspects related to
Service Level Agreement management, QoS, Security, and Scheduling are also
discussed in the same comparison framework.
Keywords: Federation of clouds, Federation architecture, FCM, ICAF, Layered architecture, SCF.
