Cloud application portability: an initial view.

Growing interest towards cloud application platforms has resulted in a large number of platform offerings to be already available on the market and new related products to be continuously launched. However, there are a number of challenges that prevent cloud application platforms from becoming widely adopted. One such challenge is application portability. This paper reports on an ongoing effort to explore the area of cloud application portability. We briefly examine the issue of heterogeneity in cloud platforms and highlight specific platform characteristics that may hinder the portability of cloud applications. We present some high level approaches and existing work that attempts to address this challenge. In order to narrow down the area of our exploration we have been carrying out an experiment in cross-platform application development and deployment with four prominent cloud platforms: OpenShift, Google App Engine, Heroku, and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk. We briefly discuss our initial conclusions from this ongoing experimentation

Leveraging Semantic Web Service Descriptions for Validation by Automated Functional Testing

Recent years have seen the utilisation of Semantic Web Service descriptions for automating a wide range of service-related activities, with a primary focus on service discovery, composition, execution and mediation. An important area which so far has received less attention is service validation, whereby advertised services are proven to conform to required behavioural specifications. This paper proposes a method for validation of service-oriented systems through automated functional testing. The method leverages ontology-based and rule-based descriptions of service inputs, outputs, preconditions and effects (IOPE) for constructing a stateful EFSM specification. The specification is subsequently utilised for functional testing and validation using the proven Stream X-machine (SXM) testing methodology. Complete functional test sets are generated automatically at an abstract level and are then applied to concrete Web services, using test drivers created from the Web service descriptions. The testing method comes with completeness guarantees and provides a strong method for validating the behaviour of Web services

A Development Framework Enabling the Design of Service-Based Cloud Applications

Cloud application platforms gain popularity and have the potential to change the way applications are developed, involving composition of platform basic services. In order to enhance the developer’s experience and reduce the barriers in the software development, a new paradigm of cloud application creation should be adopted. According to that developers are enabled to design their applications, leveraging multiple platform basic services, independently from the target application platforms. To this end, this paper proposes a development framework for the design of service-based cloud applications comprising two main components: the meta-model and the Platform Service Manager. The meta-model describes the building blocks which enable the construction of Platform Service Connectors in a uniform way while the Platform Service Manager coordinates the interaction of the application with the concrete service providers and further facilitates the administration of the deployed platform basic services

Brokerage for Quality Assurance and Optimisation of Cloud Services: An Analysis of Key Requirements

As the number of cloud service providers grows and the requirements of cloud service consumers become more complex, the latter will come to depend more and more on the intermediation services of cloud service brokers. Continuous quality assurance and optimisation of services is becoming a mission-critical objective that many consumers will find difficult to address without help from cloud service intermediaries. The Broker@Cloud project envisages a software framework that will make it easier for cloud service intermediaries to address this need, and this paper provides an analysis of key requirements for this framework. We discuss the methodology that we followed to capture these requirements, which involved defining a conceptual service lifecycle model, carrying out a series of Design Thinking workshops, and formalising requirements based on an agile requirements information model. Then, we present the key requirements identified through this process in the form of summarised results

Utilising stream reasoning techniques to underpin an autonomous framework for cloud application platforms

As cloud application platforms (CAPs) are reaching the stage where the human effort required to maintain them at an operational level is unsupportable, one of the major challenges faced by the cloud providers is to develop appropriate mechanisms for run-time monitoring and adaptation, to prevent cloud application platforms from quickly dissolving into a non-reliable environment. In this context, the application of intelligent approaches to Autonomic Clouds may offer promising opportunities. In this paper we present an approach to providing cloud platforms with autonomic capabilities, utilising techniques from the Semantic Web and Stream Reasoning research fields. The main idea of this approach is to encode values, monitored within cloud application platforms, using Semantic Web languages, which then allows us to integrate semantically-enriched observation streams with static ontological knowledge and apply intelligent reasoning. Using such run-time reasoning capabilities, we have developed a conceptual architecture for an autonomous framework and describe a prototype solution we have constructed which implements this architecture. Our prototype is able to perform analysis and failure diagnosis, and suggest further adaptation actions. We report our experience in utilising the Stream Reasoning technique in this context as well as further challenges that arise out of our work

On the Role of Ontologies in the Design of Service Based Cloud Applications

The wide exploitation of cloud resources has been hindered by the diversity on the provision of these resources and thus resulting in heterogeneity between them. Research efforts on the design of cloud applications, leveraging resources form heterogeneous cloud environments, have been concentrated on traditional cloud platform resources such as deployment capabilities and data stores. However, the emergence of the cloud application platforms has made available a wide range of platform basic services (e.g. e-mail, message queue and authentication service) that can drastically decrease the application development time. Our work focuses on eliminating the heterogeneity among the providers offering those services. To this end we propose an ontology-driven framework, which facilitates the seamless and transparent use of platform basic services provisioned by multiple clouds environments. Ontologies are leveraged to enable the homogeneous description of the functionality of the service providers

Advanced service brokerage capabilities as the catalyst for future cloud service ecosystems.

Market analysts have foreseen the emergence of cloud brokers in the mediation of cloud services. But rather than focus on current kinds of intermediary role, it is more constructive to consider the kinds of brokerage capability that could be offered in the future, which go far beyond the integration, aggregation and customization services available today. This paper identifies advanced capabilities for cloud service governance, quality assurance and optimization that will be critical in catalyzing the emergence of cloud service ecosystems, environments in which all parties will find their symbiotic niches. It shows the path whereby a platform provider could evolve to become the hub of a cloud service ecosystem, through gradually taking on more of these advanced brokerage capabilities. The paper provides an overview of work conducted by the EU FP7 Broker@Cloud project towards realizing these advanced brokerage capabilities

Organisational Knowledge Management Systems in the Era of Enterprise 2.0: The case of OrganiK.

The increasing need of small knowledge-intensive companies for loosely-coupled collaboration and ad-hoc knowledge sharing has led to a strong requirement for an alternative approach to developing knowledge management systems. This paper proposes a framework for managing organisational knowledge that builds on a socio-technical perspective that considers people and technology as two highly interconnected components. We introduce a knowledge management system architecture that merges enterprise social software characteristics from the realm of Enterprise 2.0, and information processing techniques from the domain of Semantic Web technologies, in order to deliver a KM approach that could assist in reducing the socio-technical gap