Colloquium - Chase

A multi-domain cloud combines virtual infrastructure from multiple providers to create a powerful platform for networked services, computation, and experimental systems research. NSF's GENI initiative (Global Environment for Network Innovation) is building a new foundation for such multi-domain infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) systems. This talk gives an overview of the emerging GENI architecture and its implementation in ExoGENI, a networked cloud testbed funded through the GENI program. ExoGENI is a "hybrid community cloud" based on standard cloud computing stacks augmented with an orchestration layer (ORCA) and a high degree of control over networking functions, including linkages to national circuit fabrics and OpenFlow-enabled network datapaths within each cloud site.

One lesson from the GENI experience is that key technical challenges for multi-domain control frameworks ultimately reduce to issues of trust and authorization. Trust delegation logic is a useful tool to define federated control structures rigorously in terms of the principals of the system and their trust relationships. We show how a simple logic (role-based trust logic RT0) can represent a range of trust structures proposed for GENI and other federated network testbeds and community clouds. Moreover, basing the implementation on declarative trust management allows the trust structure to evolve over time according to deployment choices of the providers and governance policies of the federation.

Jeffrey Chase is a Professor of Computer Science at Duke University and a Visiting Scientist at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI). He has spent much of the last four years working on the GENI control framework in various capacities. He leads the Open Resource Control Architecture (ORCA) project and is co-PI for the ExoGENI testbed.