Deploying a cost efficient geographically distributed private cloud architecture

Abstract

This paper focuses on the deployment of a geographically distributed private cloud architecture that offers resources similar to commercial vendors. Realising the implications of deploying such a system in an environment with limited networking resources (IP address), we decided to find a solution that would work giving each resource cluster in our cloud only one public IP address. As more cloud resources are needed, we demonstrate the ability to add these resources in a grid-like fashion to the master cloud cluster. To overcome the complexities required to use this architecture, this paper also introduces a graphical, web-based interface for the private cloud architecture. One of the problems of deploying an infrastructure-as-a-service cloud into a general organisation is getting users connected to their resources. The interface described in this paper gives users an easy way to access private cloud resources. Since the cloud computing clusters will be hosted behind NAT routers, the interface gives users the port forwarding information needed to access private cloud computational and persistent storage resources.