INFRASTRUCTURE AS A SERVICE INTRA-PLATFORM INTEROPERABILITY: An Exploratory Study with OpenStack
Cloud Computing
Infrastructure as a Service
Interoperability
OpenStack
The emergence of new digital technologies come with challenging technical and business requirements. The traditional approach to provide computational infrastructure to application workloads, which relies on in-house management of hardware, does not present a technical and cost effective manner to deliver high-performance, reliability, and scalability. As the biggest technologic paradigm shift in the history of humanity, cloud computing allows diverse deployment and service model alternatives, suitable to diverse requirements, such as security, latency, computational performance, availability and cost. Therefore, numerous companies distribute thousands of clouds across the globe, creating a healthy market through competition, where players create unique combinations of features to differentiate from competitors. Consequently, in the consumer side, picking a vendor generally translates into vendor lock-in, a situation where the applications heavily depend on the vendor’s approach of exposing features, making it difficult to switch between vendors whenever convenient. A preliminary literature review suggests that vendor lock-in, which has been widely investigated in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in inter-platform environments, has not yet been documented as an intra-platform problem. In the industry, OpenStack proves that the lack of interoperability is a real concern, even between its deployments. Therefore, this study proposes to document intra-platform interoperability, as an OpenStack problem, by detailing its lock-in situations, its technical solution, which is a broker that abstract deployment differences, and vendor lock-in causes against inter-platform interoperability, as reported in the literature.