An overview of network virtualization and cloud network as a service

Cloud computing services delivery and consumption model is based on communication infrastructure (network). The network serves as a linkage between the end‐users consuming cloud services and the providers of data centers providing the cloud services. In addition, in large‐scale cloud data centers, tens of thousands of compute and storage nodes are connected by a data center network to deliver a single‐purpose cloud service. To this end, some questions could be raised, such as the following: How do network architectures affect cloud computing? How will network architecture evolve to support better cloud computing and cloud‐based service delivery? What is the network's role in reliability, performance, scalability, and security of cloud computing? Should the network be a dumb transport pipe or an intelligent stack that is cloud workload aware? This paper focuses on the networking aspect in cloud computing and shall provide insights to these questions. Researchers can use this paper to accelerate their research on devising mechanisms for the following: (i) provisioning cloud network as a service and (ii) engineering network of data centers. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.