Intercloud

This blog post is about some basics of Intercloud. Basically a private cloud is a private data center with servers set up in such a way that one’s company can efficiently operate using load balancing and scale to maintain computing needs. An InterCloud can be simply defined as a network of private clouds.

The Internet can be defined as a public cloud. Anyone can link up to the Internet at anytime. A private cloud may be the Internet on a small scale but the main difference is it is not available to anyone. It is available only to authorized people who have access to the private space. For an example if you have a large enterprise then you might set up private clouds for several departments or divisions and link them together. Then you will have an Intercloud.

The Intercloud concept is based on the key issue that each single cloud is not having sufficient physical resources. If a cloud oversupplied the computational and storage resources, it could not be able to satisfy further requests for service allocations by its clients. The Intercloud addresses such issues. Basically each cloud can use the computational and storage resources of other clouds by using the pay-for-use method.

Intercloud is similar in concept to Internet model. Intercloud is a an open multiple infrastructure provider where applications need not to be tightly coupled into any specific cloud. The idea of Intercloud is to provide open interfaces for vendors such that there is a facility for all interconnected clouds to have a common control of how applications should be deployed. There is a common protocol and exchange mechanism for each cloud.