When Clouds Start Socializing: The Sky Model

Towards A Sky Rich Of Clouds

Contrarily to existing works on the social clouds (Chard et al., 2010; Pezzi, 2009), which primarily focus on hosting and managing social networking applications such as Facebook in the cloud, we envision a social network of clouds, we call it here the Sky, that arise from the emerging relationships among cloud members. This is a broader vision than what is described as federated clouds where private clouds interact with public ones at a limited scale for the sake of fulfilling a specific business need (Calheiros et al., 2011). Rather, the Sky is a social networking platform for clouds where they, being private or public, form and foster relationships with their peers for the purpose of near or far future use. For instance, should one of the clouds run out of computational capacity for any reason, it can search its social network for a peer cloud to help?