Federated cloud resource management: Review and discussion

Federation of clouds is the future of cloud computing, mobile cloud computing, Internet of things, and big data applications. The utilization of federated resources is envisioned to increase the quality of service, cost benefits, and reliability. Resource management in the federation of multiple clouds is a pressing issue owing to the lack of cross-domain knowledge, security, trust, and administrative policies. This study classifies these resource management functions in the federated cloud environment into resource pricing, resource discovery, resource selection, resource monitoring, resource allocation, and disaster management. Each federated resource management function is discussed, and insights into state-of-the-art research are then provided. These resource management functions are also compared based on the performance metrics that are suitable for an individual function. Finally, we indicate the open challenges for further research with regard to each classified resource management function.