Masters Thesis Presentation - Andrew Rutherfoord

Title: A Federation-Aware Billing Architecture for Decentralised Cloud Environments

Abstract:

Cloud federation enables multiple independent cloud providers to deliver services to a shared set of customers. However, current mechanisms for billing are not well studied in the context of a decentralised federation where no single entity has control. In current models, customers are charged by each provider individually. This thesis applies a design science methodology to propose a billing architecture for federated cloud environments which simplifies this process for the customer while maintaining decentralisation. The proposed solution consolidates invoicing for the customer, supports different deployment models depending on privacy and simplicity requirements, and enables different trust and liability models based on the level of inter-provider trust. The design is based on a survey of existing billing systems from related industries and interviews with cloud providers participating in the ECOFED federation. This information was used to derive a set of architectural requirements. The architecture is evaluated against these requirements, with an additional round of validation planned with the cloud providers to evaluate whether the design suits their constraints.

Supervisors: Vasilios Andrikopoulos, Dimka Karastoyanova, Edwin Harmsma, Ivo Van Dijck