Approaches for Virtual Organization Support in OpenStack

This paper describes approaches for supporting virtual organizations (VOs) in OpenStack. A VO provides a security and discovery context whereby collaboration across multiple sites can be enabled while enforcing joint security policies. VOs were developed in the grid computing arena to manage international scientific collaborations. However, the VO abstraction is not grid-specific and is applicable in any distributed computing environment, including inter-clouds. To address the need to securely manage on-demand data sharing in disaster response efforts, we prototyped VO support in OpenStack. To evaluate our practical implementation approach, and other related work, we systematically define the VO design space. This also allows us to clearly identify outstanding issues and recommendations for future work to realize effective cloud federations.