Introduction to Joint Cloud Computing

Background

Cloud computing holds the promise of “computing as a utility”, where users can access services from everywhere in a “pay-as-you-go” fashion. Enabled by cloud computing, developers are no longer required to purchase and maintain hardware to deploy their software and services, which has rapidly changed the IT industry and shaped the way how software is designed and delivered. The first-generation cloud (referred to as Cloud 1.0 in this proposal) mainly focuses on aggregating large-scale IT resources into a single cloud and providing well-managed, auto-provisioned resources and services. In Cloud 1.0, various forms of computing paradigms, such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS), have achieved remarkable. However, there has recently been new challenges emerging to cloud computing. First, globalized ecommerce has largely redefined the requirements on cloud computing, and more collaboration is required between individual clouds due to service combination and location-sensitive computation. Second, many cloud-based businesses are experiencing a burst of computation. For example, events like “November 11” and “Black Friday” usually require over 10x more resources than daily operations, creating exhausted pressure to any single cloud provider. Finally, the emerging big data and blockchain applications have brought great challenges to cloud computing performance and provider-cross service collaborations. In this scenario, not only the performance and ease-of-use, but also the trustworthiness of the services is highly urged.

To address these challenges, both academia and industry have started to consider the federation and collaboration between individual clouds (referred to as Cloud 2.0). The key feature of Cloud 2.0 is to eliminate the barrier among multiple clouds via joint cloud computing. For example, researchers from Europe have coined the concept of SuperCloud to enable cross-cloud computation migration. Cisco advocates their Intercloud Fabric to enable transparent communication across clouds. Chinese researchers have proposed Internet-based virtual computing environment (iVCE) to provide harmonious, trustworthy and transparent integrated services based on open infrastructures across multiple datacenters and cloud providers. Researchers have also explored the economy of various resource prices in different clouds to save the cost by using cost-aware cross- cloud services.

Joint cloud computing (JointCloud)

The workshop on Joint Cloud Computing aims to provision an effective pathway for researchers and practitioners to share and discuss the state of the arts and new ideas in terms of joint cloud computing (aka. JointCloud). JointCloud is a new generation of computing model beyond Cloud 2.0 which facilitates developers to customize cross-cloud services through software-defined integration and cooperation among different cloud service entities. The main objective of the workshop is to: 1) investigate theories and mechanisms of cross-cloud resource abstraction, representation, and aggregation; 2) design and implement platform-level solutions and infrastructures (computation, storage and networking) to underpin the joint cloud execution environments; 3) explore innovative applications that leverage emerging techniques such as deep learning and block chain to provision intelligent and reliable JointCloud services. Compared against previous efforts in Cloud 2.0, the philosophy of JointCloud not only focuses on the vertical orchestration of cloud resources but reinforces horizontal cooperation among cloud vendors in the form of service-oriented computing paradigm.

History

The previous edition of the workshop (2009-2015) is named "Internet-based Virtual Computing Environment” (iVCE). The historical records can be found in :