What Networking of Information Can Do for Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is making it possible to separate the process of building an infrastructure for service provisioning from the business of providing end user services. Today, such infrastructures are normally provided in large data centres and the applications are executed remotely from the users. One reason for this is that cloud computing requires a reasonably stable infrastructure and networking environment, largely due to management reasons. Networking of Information (NetInf) is an information centric networking paradigm that can support cloud computing by providing new possibilities for network transport and storage. It offers direct access to information objects through a simple API, independent of their location in the network. This abstraction can hide much of the complexity of storage and network transport systems that cloud computing today has to deal with. In this paper we analyze how cloud computing and NetInf can be combined to make cloud computing infrastructures easier to manage, and potentially enable deployment in smaller and more dynamic networking environments. NetInf should thus be understood as an enhancement to the infrastructure for cloud computing rather than a change to cloud computing technology as such. To illustrate the approach taken by NetInf, we also describe how it can be implemented by introducing a specific name resolution and routing mechanism.