Technical Report TR-2012-02

BibliographySchumm, David; Fehling, Christoph; Karastoyanova, Dimka; Leymann, Frank; Rütschlin, Jochen: Processes for Human Integration in Automated Cloud Application Management.
University of Stuttgart, Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Information Technology, Technical Report Computer Science No. 2012/02.
17 pages, english.
CR-SchemaC.0 (Computer Systems Organization, General)
C.2.4 (Distributed Systems)
D.2.2 (Software Engineering Design Tools and Techniques)
D.2.3 (Software Engineering Coding Tools and Techniques)
D.2.7 (Software Engineering Distribution, Maintenance, and Enhancement)
KeywordsCloud Computing, Application Management, Humans in Workflows
Abstract

Cloud computing has introduced elastic runtime infrastructures, in which IT resources, such as servers, may be reserved and released within minutes. These commodity resources are provided to very large customer groups allowing cloud providers and customers to equally benefit from economies of scale: even though cloud resources are provided using a static IT infrastructure, the number of users enables the cloud provider to offer pay-per-use pricing models. Therefore, customers only pay for the actually used resources and can adjust the number of resources very quickly to respond to the workload currently experienced by an application hosted in the cloud. In this scope, beneficial effects are maximized if resource management is automated so that the application itself may independently determine the number of required resources at any time of its execution. Some decisions, however, may still require human interaction. In the context of potentially self-managed cloud applications, these human decision makers should be efficiently integrated. To ensure the beneficial effects of a cloud environment, this integration has to be realized using modern communication channels in order to ensure minimal response times for human decisions. Otherwise, the flexibility and dynamicity of a cloud infrastructure is significantly hindered. As a consequence, we propose in this report to explicitly model human activities in automated management flows invoked by the self-managed cloud application.

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Department(s)University of Stuttgart, Institute of Architecture of Application Systems
Project(s)SimTech
Entry dateMarch 7, 2012
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