Modeling and Security in Cloud Ecosystems

Abstract

Clouds do not work in isolation but interact with other clouds and with a variety of systems either developed by the same provider or by external entities with the purpose to interact with them; forming then an ecosystem. A software ecosystem is a collection of software systems that have been developed to coexist and evolve together. The stakeholders of such a system need a variety of models to give them a perspective of the possibilities of the system, to evaluate specific quality attributes, and to extend the system. A powerful representation when building or using software ecosystems is the use of architectural models, which describe the structural aspects of such a system. These models have value for security and compliance, are useful to build new systems, can be used to define service contracts, find where quality factors can be monitored, and to plan further expansion. We have described a cloud ecosystem in the form of a pattern diagram where its components are patterns and reference architectures. A pattern is an encapsulated solution to a recurrent problem. We have recently expanded these models to cover fog systems and containers. Fog Computing is a highly-virtualized platform that provides compute, storage, and networking services between end devices and Cloud Computing Data Centers; a Software Container provides an execution environment for applications sharing a host operating system, binaries, and libraries with other containers. We intend to use this architecture to answer a variety of questions about the security of this system as well as a reference to design interacting combinations of heterogeneous components. We defined a metamodel to relate security concepts which is being expanded.