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Cloud service brokerage: enhancing resilience in virtual enterprises through service governance and quality assurance

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Abstract

We argue that cloud service brokerage (CSB) mechanisms can strengthen the resilience of services in cloud-based VEs. In this respect, we present the Service Completeness-Compliance Checker (SC\(^3\)), a mechanism which offers capabilities with respect to the quality assurance dimension of CSB. More specifically, the SC\(^3\) strengthens the resilience of cloud services by evaluating their conformance with pre-specified policies concerning the business aspects of their delivery, as well as by managing the evolution of their lifecycle in a controlled and policy-based manner. By relying on an ontology-based representation of policies and services, the SC\(^3\) achieves a proper separation of concerns between policy definition and policy enforcement. This effectively enables the SC\(^3\) to operate in a manner generic and agnostic to any underlying cloud delivery platform, as well as to reason about the well-formedness of the pre-specified policies.

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Notes

  1. The SC\(^3\) also offers capabilities with respect to the Service Operation phase and, in particular, with respect to continuously monitoring the behaviour of a service. These capabilities shall not, however, concern us in this paper.

  2. We use the term ‘broker’ to emphasise that, in our work, such a business policy is formulated according to the declarative approach of our brokerage framework (see Sect. 3).

  3. Such as SLA, Security, IPR, Pricing [15].

  4. Note that in order to reduce notational clutter we avoid specifying namespaces for classes and properties, unless a class or property comes from an external ontology (e.g. the GoodRelations ontology). In addition, the following conventions are used in the figures of this paper (see also the legend of Fig. 1): a class is represented by an oval; a property is represented by an arrow decorated with the name of the property; a subclass relation is represented by an arrow decorated with the subset symbol (\(\subseteq \)); instance-class associations are represented with perforated lines.

  5. Of course, an analogous account applies to the rest of the attributes and SLOs of Table 1.

  6. Or of the class gr:QualitativeValue, in case of qualitative variables.

  7. Or through sub-properties of the hasDefaultQualitativeValue, in case of qualitative values.

  8. Recall from Sect. 2 that a BP is, after all, a set of SLOs.

  9. Of course, which SLOs are comprised by a particular SLP is an application-specific issue determined by CPx itself. For instance, CPx may choose to define a ‘gold’ SLP as comprising either ‘gold’-only SLOs, or two ‘gold’ SLOs and a ‘silver’ SLO; alternatively, it may choose to define the latter grouping as a ‘silver’ SLP.

  10. The classes and properties depicted in Fig. 2 are by no means the complete set of classes and properties offered by Linked USDL Core, but rather an appropriate subset discerned for the purposes of this work.

  11. Although in this paper we concentrate (without loss of generality) on a single BP, a cloud delivery platform such as CPx may employ a number of different policies—e.g. in order to accommodate the needs of different service categories.

  12. Tangential in the sense that they do not describe core aspects of a BP but rather focus on pertinent peripheral information.

  13. The BP is constructed through an interface that exposes an appropriate editor and is transported to the SC\(^3\) through a relevant topic of the Pub/sub system (not shown in Fig. 3 to avoid clutter).

  14. It is assumed that an already on-boarded service is updated when its SP submits a fresh SD.

  15. It is assumed that a deprecated service remains in the system but all support to it ceases.

  16. The purpose of such a timescale is twofold: on the one hand, it allows the users of the service under deprecation to switch to one or more services of similar functionality. On the other hand, it allows the providers of any services that depend upon the service under deprecation to resolve these dependencies—e.g. again by replacing the service under deprecation with one or more other services of similar functionality.

  17. Otherwise, the service cannot be admitted for on-boarding as it cannot conform with the BP.

  18. \(s'\) is derived from s by appending a random character.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the EU 7th Framework Programme under the Broker@Cloud project (www.broker-cloud.eu), Grant Agreement No. 328392.

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  1. South East European Research Centre (SEERC), The University of Sheffield, International Faculty CITY College, 24 Proxenou Koromila St, 54622, Thessaloníki, Greece

    Simeon Veloudis, Iraklis Paraskakis & Christos Petsos

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  1. Simeon Veloudis
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Correspondence to Simeon Veloudis.

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Veloudis, S., Paraskakis, I. & Petsos, C. Cloud service brokerage: enhancing resilience in virtual enterprises through service governance and quality assurance. SOCA 11, 445–458 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11761-017-0220-2

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