Introducing risk management into the grid

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are explicit statements about all expectations and obligations in the business partnership between customers and providers. They have been introduced in Grid computing to overcome the best effort approach, making the Grid more interesting for commercial applications. However, decisions on negotiation and system management still rely on static approaches, not reflecting the risk linked with decisions. The EC-funded project "AssessGrid" aims at introducing risk assessment and management as a novel decision paradigm into Grid computing. This paper gives a general motivation for risk management and presents the envisaged architecture of a "risk-aware" Grid middleware and Grid fabric, highlighting its functionality by means of three showcase scenarios

QoS Composition and Analysis in Reconfigurable Web Services Choreographies

International audienceQuality of Service (QoS) in orchestrated web services compositions have been well studied with probabilistic and multi-dimensional models. Choreographies that involve message passing among services, on the other hand, require further analysis. In this paper, we begin with the set of QoS domains that may be studied in case of choreographies and the algebraic rules for their composition. As choreographies manage QoS composition in a distributed fashion, techniques to enrich functional specifications with QoS are examined using the model proposed in the CHOReOS project. These are further analyzed with choreographies that may reconfigure due to functional or QoS requirements. Studies on the effects of such reconfiguration on multiple QoS domains can lead to better understanding of optimal runtime configurations along with associated tradeoffs. A goal programming approach is also proposed to choose Pareto optimal solutions with respect to diverse QoS domains

Monotony in Service Orchestrations

Web Service orchestrations are compositions of different Web Services to form a new service. The services called during the orchestration guarantee a given performance to the orchestrater, usually in the form of contracts. These contracts can be used by the orchestrater to deduce the contract it can offer to its own clients, by performing contract composition. An implicit assumption in contract based QoS management is: "the better the component services perform, the better the orchestration's performance will be". Thus, contract based QoS management for Web services orchestrations implicitly assumes monotony. In some orchestrations, however, monotony can be violated, i.e., the performance of the orchestration improves when the performance of a component service degrades. This is highly undesirable since it can render the process of contract composition inconsistent. In this paper we define monotony for orchestrations modelled by Colored Occurrence Nets (CO-nets) and we characterize the classes of monotonic orchestrations. We show that few orchestrations are indeed monotonic, mostly since latency can be traded for quality of data. We also propose a sound refinement of monotony, called conditional monotony, which forbids this kind of cheating and show that conditional monotony is widely satisfied by orchestrations. This finding leads to reconsidering the way SLAs should be formulated

QoS Analysis in Heterogeneous Choreography Interactions

International audienceWith an increasing number of services and devices interacting in a decentralized manner, choreographies are an active area of investigation. The heterogeneous nature of interacting systems leads to choreographies that may not only include conventional services, but also sensor-actuator networks, databases and service feeds. Their middleware behavior within choreographies is captured through abstract interaction paradigms such as client-service, publish-subscribe and tuple space. In this paper, we study these heterogeneous interaction paradigms, connected through an eXtensible Service Bus proposed in the CHOReOS project. As the functioning of such choreographies is dependent on the Quality of Service (QoS) performance of participating entities, an intricate analysis of interaction paradigms and their effect on QoS metrics is needed. We study the composition of QoS metrics in heterogeneous choreographies, and the subsequent tradeoffs. This produces interesting insights such as selection of a particular system and its middleware during design time or end-to-end QoS expectation/guarantees during runtime. Non-parametric hypothesis tests are applied to systems, where QoS dependent services may be replaced at runtime to prevent deterioration in performance

QUALITY OF PROCESS ? A BUSINESS PROCESS PERSPECTIVE ON QUALITY OF SERVICE

The fundamental paradigm shift from a product- to a service-oriented economy implies novel technical and organizational challenges. The resulting dynamic of the technical infrastructure and the increasing development towards requesting external business services to be integrated into end-to-end business processes requires mechanisms ensuring the reliability of the organization?s composed services, workflows and business processes. From a business perspective, QoS characteristics defined based on technical services within the infrastructural layer have to be aggregated to more business-relevant Key Performance Indicators on business process layer to express the Quality of Process. These KPIs represent quality that is highly related to the business?s performance (e.g. processing time of a business service) and are crucial for achieving predefined goals in order to stay competitive in the market. The contribution of this paper is threefold: We (i) provide an in-depth requirements analysis for such a holistic quality management framework, we (ii) develop a holistic aggregation framework which enables service level aggregation incorporating the loosely coupled structure of business processes with invoked systems and services in an instance based manner. To demonstrate the expressive power of our framework we (iii) provide an exemplary industrial application scenario and illustrate the functioning and interplay of the designed artifacts