Cloud federation in a cloud computing environment

Abstract

Various methods, devices, and systems are described for cloud federation in a cloud computing network including bridging computing resources between an enterprise and a cloud or among multiple clouds. These techniques involve generating an image of the host system and decoupling it from its underlying computing resources so that it can be migrated across disparate computing resources in a seamless manner. In one embodiment, an enterprise workload can be bridged with cloud resources to receive software as a service. In other embodiments, bridging is performed across multiple public or private clouds, each potentially having disparate computing resources. In addition, users can access and use these cloud services through a web browser or other network interface anywhere in the cloud computing network as if the services were installed locally on their own computer.