Howard Foster

Advanced service monitoring configurations with SLA decomposition and selection

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for Software Services aim to clearly identify the service level commitments established between service requesters and providers. The commitments that are agreed however can be expressed in complex notations through a combination of expressions that need to evaluated and monitored efficiently. The dynamic allocation of the responsibility for monitoring SLAs (and often different parts within them) to different monitoring components is necessary as both SLAs and the components available for monitoring them may change dynamically during the operation of a service based system. In this paper we discuss an approach to supporting this dynamic configuration, and in particular, how SLAs expressed in higher-level notations can be efficiently decomposed and appropriate monitoring components dynamically allocated for each part of the agreements. The approach is illustrated with mechanical support in the form of a configuration service which can be incorporated into SLA-based service monitoring infrastructures.

SMaRT: a workbench for reporting the monitorability of services from SLAs

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for Software Services aim to clearly identify the service level commitments established between service requesters and providers. A dynamic configuration for the monitoring of these SLAs provides the opportunity for service monitor providers to offer and release monitoring infrastructures for different types of services. Whilst there has been work on automating this monitor matching and configuration, additional support may be needed in the negotiation and provision of monitors for which the current monitoring infrastructure does not provide suitable SLA term monitors. In this paper we describe an approach to effectively report and assist service monitoring support groups in managing this provision. The approach described is illustrated with mechanical support in the form of a SMaRT Workbench Eclipse IDE plug-in for reporting on the monitorability of SLAs for service monitoring infrastructures.

Formal Certification and Compliance for Run-Time Service Environments

With the increased awareness of security and safety of services in on-demand distributed service provisioning (such as the recent adoption of Cloud infrastructures), certification and compliance checking of services is becoming a key element for service engineering. Existing certification techniques tend to support mainly design-time checking of service properties and tend not to support the run-time monitoring and progressive certification in the service execution environment. In this paper we discuss an approach which provides both design-time and runtime behavioural compliance checking for a services architecture, through enabling a progressive event-driven model-checking technique. Providing an integrated approach to certification and compliance is a challenge however using analysis and monitoring techniques we present such an approach for on-going compliance checking.

G-SLAM – The Anatomy of the Generic SLA Manager

The Generic SLA Manager, also known as the G-SLAM, provides a generic architecture that can be used across different domains and use cases to manage the entire SLA life cycle, including activities such as negotiating SLAs, provisioning resources, monitoring and adjustment. A first approach to this architecture is described in [7]. The key feature of this approach is the high degree of flexibility provided for dynamic behavior (assisted by OSGi), customisable system deployment, and the ability to reconfigure individual pieces comprising the G-SLAM. Each concrete SLAM implementation can customise or reuse components, integrate new components or replace others with minimal effort, and even swap components at runtime.

4th International Workshop on Adaptive Services for the Future Internet (WAS4FI 2014): Preface

The Future Internet has emerged as a new initiative to pave a novel infrastructure linked to objects (things) of the real world to meet the changing global needs of business and society. It offers internet users a standardized, secure, efficient and trustable environment, which allows open and distributed access to global networks, services and information. There is a need for both researchers and practitioners to develop platforms made up of adaptive Future Internet applications. In this sense, the emergence and consolidation of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), Cloud Computing and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) give benefits, such as flexibility, scalability, security, interoperability, and adaptability, for building these applications.

Sixth international workshop on automation of software test (AST 2011)

The Sixth International Workshop on Automation of Software Test (AST 2011) is associated with the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2011). This edition of AST was focused on the special theme of Software Design and the Automation of Software Test and authors were encouraged to submit work in this area. The workshop covers two days with presentations of regular research papers, industrial case studies and experience reports. The workshop also aims to have extensive discussions on collaborative solutions in the form of charette sessions. This paper summarizes the organization of the workshop, the special theme, as well as the sessions.

Taming the cloud: safety, certification and compliance for software services

The maturity of IT processes, such as software development, can be and is often certified. Current trends in the IT industry suggest that software systems in the future will be very different from their counterparts today, with an increasing adoption of the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) design pattern and the deployment of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) on Cloud infrastructures. In this talk we discuss some issues surrounding engineering Software Services for Cloud infrastructures and highlight the need for enhanced control, service-level agreement and compliance mechanisms for Software Services. Cloud Infrastructures and Service Mash-ups.

Seventh international workshop on engineering service-oriented applications (WESOA 2011)

Rapidly expanding applications of software services, in particular in the context of cloud computing, demand close collaboration of research community and industry practitioners in the development of comprehensive and reliable methodologies and tools that support the entire service systems development lifecycle (SDLC). Development of service-oriented applications presents specific challenges as such applications tend to be process-driven, loosely-coupled, and composed from autonomous services supported by diverse systems. Service-oriented applications typically need to provide multiple, flexible and sometimes situational interaction channels within and beyond organizational structures and processes. Engineering of such software systems requires collaborative and cross-disciplinary development processes, methodologies and tools capable of addressing multiple SDLCs of various service artifacts. There is an urgent need for research community and industry practitioners to agree on comprehensive engineering principles, methodologies and develop tools to support for the entire SDLC of service-oriented applications.

Dynamic Creation of Monitoring Infrastructures

As a key part of monitoring and management, systems developed with a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) design pattern should utilise negotiated agreements between service providers and requesters. Typically, the results of these negotiations are specified in Service Level Agreements (SLAs), which are then used to monitor key levels of service provided, and to optionally specify preconditions and actions in case these levels are violated.