  This chapter presents: (i) a layered peer-to-peer Cloud provisioning
architecture; (ii) a summary of the current state-of-the-art in Cloud
provisioning with particular emphasis on service discovery and load-balancing;
(iii) a classification of the existing peer-to-peer network management model
with focus on extending the DHTs for indexing and managing complex provisioning
information; and (iv) the design and implementation of novel, extensible
software fabric (Cloud peer) that combines public/private clouds, overlay
networking and structured peer-to-peer indexing techniques for supporting
scalable and self-managing service discovery and load-balancing in Cloud
computing environments. Finally, an experimental evaluation is presented that
demonstrates the feasibility of building next generation Cloud provisioning
systems based on peer-to-peer network management and information dissemination
models. The experimental test-bed has been deployed on a public cloud computing
platform, Amazon EC2, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed
peer-to-peer Cloud provisioning software fabric.
