SLA-based management of software licenses as web service resources in distributed computing infrastructures

Abstract

Until recently the use of applications requiring a software license for execution was quite limited in distributed environments. Due to the mandatory centralised control of license usage at application runtime, e.g. heartbeat control by the license server running at the home site of a user, traditional software licensing practices are not suitable especially when the distributed computing infrastructure stretches across administrative domains. In this paper we present a novel approach for managing software licenses as web service resources in distributed service oriented environments. Licenses become mobile objects, which may travel to the environment where required to authorise the execution of a license protected application. A first implementation has been realised for dynamic Grid environments in the European SmartLM project co-funded by the European Commission. The SmartLM solution decouples authorisation for license usage from authorisation for application execution. All authorisations are expressed as and guaranteed by Service Level Agreements. We will present the core technology, discuss various security aspects and how they are addressed in the SmartLM prototype, and present the evaluation of the prototype through a number of usage scenarios. Finally, we will give an outlook on specific issues and current work extending the solution to Clouds and service based systems in general.