VM Image Repository and Distribution Models for Federated Clouds: State of the Art, Possible Directions and Open Issues

TL;DR

This paper reviews current architectures and methods for storing and distributing VM images in federated clouds, highlighting challenges, trends, and potential improvements for efficient VM provisioning across multiple cloud providers.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of existing VMI repository and distribution models, and discusses open issues and future directions in federated cloud environments.

Findings

Analyzes state-of-the-art VMI storage and distribution mechanisms.

Identifies limitations and challenges in current federated cloud VMI management.

Suggests future research directions for improving VM provisioning efficiency.

Abstract

The emerging trend of Federated Cloud models enlist virtualization as a significant concept to offer a large scale distributed Infrastructure as a Service collaborative paradigm to end users. Virtualization leverage Virtual Machines (VM) instantiated from user specific templates labelled as VM Images (VMI). To this extent, the rapid provisioning of VMs with varying user requests ensuring Quality of Service (QoS) across multiple cloud providers largely depends upon the image repository architecture and distribution policies. We discuss the possible state-of-art in VMI storage repository and distribution mechanisms for efficient VM provisioning in federated clouds. In addition, we present and compare various representative systems in this realm. Furthermore, we define a design space, identify current limitations, challenges and open trends for VMI repositories and distribution techniques within federated infrastructure.