A practical evaluation of a network expansion mechanism in an openstack cloud federation

The SSICLOPS consortium recently designed a transparent virtual network expansion mechanism for OpenStack. In this paper, we build up on this mechanism to propose features to improve the interconnection for inter-cloud federations. Based on distributed in-memory databases and High Energy Physics (HEP) workloads as two representative cloud computing workloads, we performed extensive performance evaluations to demonstrate that in a setup comprised of five sites across Europe, the performances of our interconnection agent are similar to the performances of the legacy VPNaaS feature provided by OpenStack. However, the interconnection agent is not restricted to the exemplary uses cases, as it is applicable to arbitrary workloads. This enables us to work in the direction of transparent inter-cloud live migration from a networking point of view.