Multi-cloud provisioning of business processes

Kyriakos Kritikos,Frank Griesinger,Daniel Seybold,Jörg Domaschka,Roman Sosa Gonzalez,Joaquin Iranzo,Chrysostomos Zeginis

doi:10.1186/s13677-019-0143-x

Abstract

The Cloud offers enhanced flexibility in the management of resources for any kind of application while it promises the reduction of its cost as well as its infinite scalability. In this way, due to these advantages, there is a recent move towards migrating business processes (BPs) in the Cloud. Such a move is currently performed in a manual manner and only in the context of one Cloud. However, a multi- & cross-Cloud configuration of a BP can be beneficial as it can allow exploiting the best possible offers from multiple Clouds and enable to avoid the lock-in effect by also having the ability to deploy different instances of the BP in different Clouds close to the locations of BP customers. In this respect, this article presents a novel architecture of an environment which realises the vision of multi-Cloud BP provisioning. This environment involves innovative components which support the cross-level orchestration of cloud services as well as the cross-level monitoring and adaptation of BPs. It also relies on a certain language called CAMEL which has been extended to support the adaptive provisioning of multi-Cloud BPs.

Highlights

Cloud computing promises the infinite leasing of cheap commodity resources with a very flexible, pay-as-yougo pricing model
We should highlight that this article focuses on Business process (BP) that can be moved to the cloud. These can correspond to any kind of BP, whose functionality can be realised by SaaS services and whose internal software components can be deployed via using PaaS or IaaS services
While the approach is validated based on the deployment of a basic three tier Web application across the IaaS providers Rackspace and IBM Softlayer, the cross-level orchestration capability is only validated on a conceptual level

Summary

Introduction

Cloud computing promises the infinite leasing of cheap commodity resources with a very flexible, pay-as-yougo pricing model. The proposed environment covers the execution phase by including innovative components which support: (a) the cross-cloud and -level orchestration of cloud services for BP execution; (b) the cross-cloud and cross-level BP monitoring and coordinated adaptation It relies on the existence of CAMEL3 [1, 52], a multi-domain-specific language (multi-DSL) which supports the management of multi-cloud applications. These can correspond to any kind of BP, whose functionality can be realised by SaaS services and whose internal software components can be deployed via using PaaS or IaaS services Such BPs can be designed by using BP Design Environments like the one offered in CloudSocket [22, 28] and might be examined in terms of their cloud readiness via the use of assessment tools, like CloudSocket’s Cloud Transformation Framework [40]. The framework supports private, public and hybrid IaaS clouds; it has been validated against the commercial tools Cloudify and Scalr

Limitations

Conclusions