Cloud Federations

With the maturation of the Cloud Computing, the eyes of the scientific community and specialized commercial institutions have turned to research related to the use of multiple clouds. The main reason for this interest is the limitations that many cloud providers individually face to meet all the inherent characteristics of this paradigm. Therefore, using multiple cloud organizations opens the opportunity for the providers to consume resources with more attractive prices, increase the resilience as well as to monetize their own idle resources. When considering customers, problems as interruption of services, lack of interoperability that lead to lock-in and loss of quality of services due to locality are presented as limiting to the adoption of Cloud Computing. This chapter presents an introduction to conceptual characterization of Cloud Federation. Moreover, it presents the challenges in implementing federation architectures, requirements for the development of this type of organization and the relevant architecture proposals.