[Paper Review] A Survey and Comparative Study on Multi-Cloud Architectures: Emerging Issues And Challenges For Cloud Federation

Deepika Saxena, Rishabh Gupta+1 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|Aug 29, 2021

Cloud Computing and Resource Management43 references20 citations

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive survey and comparative analysis of multi-cloud architectures, evaluating their interoperability, security, and management challenges. It proposes the SuperCloud model as the most comprehensive solution to date, offering unified, self-managed, and self-protecting multi-cloud orchestration, though it remains under development with no full implementation yet.

ABSTRACT

Multi-cloud concept has broaden the world of cloud computing and has become a buzzword today. The word Multi-cloud envisions utilization of services from multiple heterogeneous cloud providers via a single architecture at customer premises. Though cloud computing has many issues and offers open research challenges, still the academics and industrial research has paved a pathway for multi-cloud environment. The concept of multi-cloud is in maturing phase, and many research projects are in progress to provide a multi-cloud architecture which is successfully enabled in all the respects like easy configuration, security, management etc. In this paper, concepts, challenges, requirement and future directions for multi-cloud environment are discussed. A survey of existing approaches and solutions provided by different multi-cloud architectures is entailed along with analysis of the pros and cons of different architectures while comparing the same.

Motivation & Objective

• To analyze the evolving landscape of multi-cloud architectures and identify key challenges in interoperability, security, and management.
• To evaluate existing multi-cloud frameworks and their ability to address vendor lock-in, heterogeneous APIs, and diverse SLAs.
• To compare the pros and cons of prominent multi-cloud solutions including Spinnaker, Cloud Foundry, and SuperCloud.
• To identify the most viable architectural model for cloud federation that supports seamless, secure, and manageable multi-cloud operations.
• To provide future research directions for achieving fully interoperable, secure, and scalable multi-cloud ecosystems.

Proposed method

• Conducting a systematic survey of existing multi-cloud architectures and cloud federation frameworks.
• Analyzing the technical and operational characteristics of each architecture, including their use of brokers, APIs, and orchestration layers.
• Evaluating architectures based on interoperability (vertical and horizontal), security, management, and ease of deployment.
• Comparing frameworks such as Spinnaker (for deployment pipelines), Cloud Foundry (for application portability), and SuperCloud (for unified, self-protecting cloud management).
• Assessing the role of cloud brokers and cloud exchanges in enabling dynamic service contracts and trust in federated environments.
• Synthesizing findings to identify the most comprehensive and future-ready model—SuperCloud—based on its holistic approach to multi-cloud management.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 What are the primary challenges in achieving interoperability across heterogeneous multi-cloud environments?
• RQ2 How do existing multi-cloud architectures differ in their handling of security, trust, and management across multiple cloud providers?
• RQ3 To what extent do current frameworks address vendor lock-in and support dynamic workload placement across public and private clouds?
• RQ4 Which multi-cloud architecture model offers the most comprehensive solution for unified, secure, and self-managed cloud federation?
• RQ5 What are the key limitations of existing multi-cloud solutions, and what future research directions are needed to achieve full cloud federation?

Key findings

• The SuperCloud model is identified as the most comprehensive multi-cloud architecture, offering self-management, self-protection, and unified control over multiple cloud providers.
• Interoperability remains the biggest challenge, with differences in APIs, storage models, networking, and virtualization across cloud providers.
• Most existing frameworks, such as Spinnaker and Cloud Foundry, focus on deployment and orchestration but lack native security and trust management features.
• Cloud brokers and cloud exchanges improve trust and dynamic contract negotiation but do not fully resolve security or management complexity.
• Despite significant research, no fully implemented and production-ready multi-cloud system exists yet, with SuperCloud being the most promising but still ongoing.
• The paper concludes that while many models address interoperability, few comprehensively handle security, trust, and management—highlighting a critical research gap.