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

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$$^3$$3), a mechanism which offers capabilities with respect to the quality assurance dimension of CSB. More specifically, the SC$$^3$$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$$^3$$3 achieves a proper separation of concerns between policy definition and policy enforcement. This effectively enables the SC$$^3$$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.