1. Policy based Cloud Services on a VCL platform
Karuna P Joshi, Yelena Yesha, Tim Finin, Anupam Joshi
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

2. Cloud Computing : The present
New paradigm for IT services delivery
IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, …… , XaaS
Focus is on “virtualizing” resources
Great progress in dynamic provisioning at hardware resource level
Software/Service is still relatively statically provisioned
Gaps in current work
Lack of Cloud “service engineering”
Managing the entire lifecycle automatically

3. Future Vision for Cloud
Virtualized Services on the Cloud
Service dynamically composed - On Demand composition
Service structure/components not pre-determined
Multiple provisioning.
Moving from totally manual to mostly automatic
needed if we truly want to leverage the cloud and service virtualization capabilities and efficiencies

4. Key Open Research Issues
Current cloud research focused on
Improving cloud infrastructure – Virtual machines, Cloud OS etc.
Semantic description of services, and even some composition work
Limited research on how to use the cloud services efficiently
Most steps in service negotiation, acquisition, and consumption/monitoring still require significant human intervention
Difficult to manage service quality especially of composed services created by different providers

5. Key Contributions of Our Research
A semantically rich, policy-based framework can be used to automate the lifecycle of virtualized services on the cloud
Use semantic web languages/technologies
Developed an integrated lifecycle of virtualized services on the Cloud
Negotiation for cloud service acquisition by constraint relaxation
Service quality framework

6. Service Lifecycle Methodology
Our methodology divides Service processes Lifecycle on the Cloud into Five Phases
Requirements, Discovery, Negotiation, Composition and Consumption
This Methodology is applicable on any cloud deployment.
We have developed high level ontologies for the five phases that enables automation.
available in OWL at

7. Phases of IT Services Lifecycle
Service Requirements
Service Discovery
Service Negotiation
Service Composition
Service Consumption
SERVICE CLOUD
CONSUMER
Service specified
Provider(s) identified
New Service needed
Contract signed
Service delivered

8. Service Requirements Requirements for a service will include
Functional specifications (tasks to be automated)
Budgetary policies/Cost constraints
Technical Policy specifications
Human Agent Policy
Security Policy
Data Quality Policy
Service Compliance Policy

9. Service Discovery
Cloud Broker used to search available services that match the specifications
Identify gaps that exist in services discovered
Cloud Auditor or centralized registry, similar to UDDI, will certify the service provided.

10. Service Negotiation
Discussion and agreement that the Service provider and consumer have regarding the Service.
Service Level Agreements (SLA) finalized between consumer and provider
Quality of Service (QoS) decided between primary provider and component providers.

11. Service Composition Phase
One or more services provided by one or more providers are combined and delivered as a single Service
SLA and QoS finalized in the negotiation phase used for determining service components and its orchestration (the sequence of execution)
We reuse the OWL-S ontology to model and reason about compositions

12. Service Consumption Phase
Composed Service is consumed and monitored in this phase
Key measures like Service Performance and reliability are monitored using automated tools.
SLA, QoS determine performance of the service
Phase includes Service Delivery, Service payment
Customer Satisfaction is tracked in this phase

13. Cloud Broker Architecture
Cloud User
User Interface
Translate to machine processable format
Final SLA for approval 1 4 9
Service
Cloud Service Broker agent 2
Service
Discovery federated SPARQL query 5
SLA negotiation 3
Final
SLA 8
Service URI
Service endpoint (provider agent) 6
Service URI
Final configuration 7
Virtual Service Instance
(Eucalyptus/VCL)
Cloud Provider

14. Collaboration with NIST
US government agency NIST working on standardizing cloud computing
Member of Reference architecture and Taxonomy groups
Member of Cloud Security group
Prototype for NIST
Automation of Cloud Storage Service acquisition, consumption /monitoring.
Using Service lifecycle Ontologies developed by us.
Platform: using SPARQL, RDF, Web technologies – Perl, HTML.
NIST Cloud Computing workshop, Nov

15. Some Policies/Constraints …
Cloud security – would like to mandate policies at the Cloud hardware level
Data security policies
US government compliance policies
User authentication policy : FIPS is a standard used to accredit cryptographic modules.
Trusted Internet Connection mandated to optimize individual external connections.
Want to be interoperable across Cloud platforms

16. Storage Service Architecture
Cloud user
User Interface
<rdf>
Rfs description
</rdf>
Translate to machine process able format
Final SLA
Service URI
Service
Cloud Service Procurer module
Discover service
Respond
SLA negotiation
Cloud
Cloud Provider 1
Joseki SPARQL endpoint
Virtual Service Instance
(Eucalyptus/Bluegrit)
Cloud Provider 2
Joseki SPARQL endpoint
Virtual Service Instance
(Eucalyptus/Bluegrit)
Cloud Provider 3
<rdf>
SLA description
</rdf>
Joseki SPARQL endpoint
Virtual Service Instance
(Eucalyptus/Bluegrit)

17. NIST prototype demo

18. Request for Service : RDF file
<?xml version="1.0"?> <rdf:RDF xmlns=" xmlns:xsd=" xmlns:dc=" xmlns:rdfs=" xmlns:itso=" xmlns:stg=" xmlns:rdf=" <rdf:Description rdf:about=" <itso:RFS_Respond_By_Date> Fri Apr 27 11:53: </itso:RFS_Respond_By_Date> <itso:Expected_Begin_Date_of_Service> </itso:Expected_Begin_Date_of_Service> <itso:Service_Cost_Constraint> 0 </itso:Service_Cost_Constraint> <itso:Service_Location_constraint> global </itso:Service_Location_constraint> <stg:storage> 2GB </stg:storage> <stg:backup> Weekly </stg:backup> <stg:availability> 95 </stg:availability> <stg:datadeletion> data archived </stg:datadeletion> <stg:Encryption> Data Encrypted </stg:Encryption> <stg:authentication> FIPS supported </stg:authentication> <stg:VMseparation> VM separation </stg:VMseparation> <stg:storage_interface> SOAP WSDL </stg:storage_interface> <stg:TIC_connection> TIC Compliant </stg:TIC_connection> <stg:CC_EAL> 3 </stg:CC_EAL> <stg:cloud_instance_size> 1GB </stg:cloud_instance_size> <stg:cloud_instance_speed> 1GHz </stg:cloud_instance_speed> <stg:cloud_instance_cores> 10 </stg:cloud_instance_cores> </rdf:Description> </rdf:RDF>

19. Storage Service Broker URL

20. Summary
For broader adoption of cloud computing, we need to automate cloud service processes
Developed an integrated methodology to acquire, consume and monitor services on the cloud.
Future work: improving upon the cloud broker integration with VCL
Ontologies in public domain.
Publications available at