NIST Public Working Group on Federated Cloud (PWGFC)

This public working group will focus on developing an approach to advancing the Federated Community Cloud, which falls under Requirement 5 of the U.S. Government Cloud Computing Technology Roadmap, USG-Wide Use of Cloud Computing Standards. Not to be confused with the concept of cloud deployment models, the focus of Federated Community clouds is to develop a framework to support seamless implementations of disparate community cloud environments. The future of cloud computing is where both internal and external cloud resources from multiple providers are deployed and managed in order to meet business needs. To achieve this industry and government will need to work together to develop frameworks, technologies, and methodologies that can support seamless implementation of various cloud computing environments through a focus on interoperability and portability standards.
 
The scope of the project is to fully understand and describe the elements of federated cloud computing. This will involve developing and gaining consensus on a common federated cloud computing vocabulary, as well as developing an underlying conceptual model of what federated cloud computing is, its major components, and users/stakeholders. The Working Group will then use that conceptual model to map out an implementation strategy including a gap analysis to identify the missing technologies and standards needed to cultivate a seamless system of systems. The anticipated results are:

• Federated Cloud Computing Vocabulary;
• Conceptual Model of Federated Clouds; and
• Technology Gap Analysis.

The Working Group will also investigate and identify the needed technologies, tools, and standards to enable these environments. They will use material from NIST’s Cloud Computing Reference Architecture (NIST SP 500-292) and materials located at the group’s public twiki site: http://collaborate.nist.gov/twiki-cloud-computing/bin/view/CloudComputing/RATax_FedCommunity.
 
The Working Group will work in a coordinated effort with the IEEE ICWG/2302 WG – Intercloud Working Group to produce an implementation of this reference material and create a compliant technical standard.