Inception: Towards a Nested Cloud Architecture

Despite the increasing popularity of Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds, providers have been very slow in adopting a large number of innovative technologies, such as live VM migration, dynamic resource management, and VM replication. In this paper, we argue that the reasons are not only technical but also fundamental, due to lack of transparency and conflict of interest between providers and customers. We present our vision inception, a nested IaaS cloud architecture to overcome this impasse. Inception clouds are built entirely on top of the resources acquired from today’s clouds, and provide nested VMs to end users. We discuss the benefits, use cases, and challenges of inception clouds, and present our network design and prototype implementation.