STRATModel: Elasticity Model Description Language for Evaluating Elasticity Strategies for Business Processes

Abstract

Nowadays, Cloud Computing is receiving more and more attention from IT companies as a new computing paradigm for executing and handling their Business Processes in an efficient and cost-effective way. One of the most important features behind this attention is the Cloud Computing’s elasticity which became the focus of many research works. Its management has been considered as a pivotal issue among IT community that works on finding the right tradeoffs between QoS levels and operational costs by developing novel methods and mechanisms. Elasticity controller has been used in many research works to automate the provisioning of cloud resources and control cloud applications elasticity. However, most of the previous works have been proposed based on a specific elasticity model for either vertical or horizontal elasticity. In this paper, we propose an elasticity model description language for Service-based Business processes (SBP), called StratModel. It allows business process holders to define different elasticity models with different elasticity capabilities by providing their elasticity mechanisms through set of examples and automatically generate their associated elasticity controllers. The generated elasticity controllers are used for evaluating elasticity strategies before using them in real cloud environments. Based on StratModel, we present our elasticity strategies evaluation framework that facilitates the description and evaluation of elasticity strategies for SBPs according to a customized elasticity model. Our contributions and developments provide Cloud tenants with facilities to choose elasticity strategies that fit to their business processes and usage behaviors using a customized elasticity controller.