Automating Cloud Application Management Using Management Idioms

摘要

Patterns are a well-established concept to document generic solutions for recurring problems in an abstract manner. Especially in Information Technology (IT), many pattern languages exist that ease creating application architectures, designs, and management processes. Their generic nature provides a powerful means to describe knowledge in an abstract fashion that can be reused and refined for concrete use cases. However, the required manual refinement currently prevents applying the concept of patterns efficiently in the domain of Cloud Application Management as automation is one of the most important requirements in Cloud Computing. This paper presents an approach that enables automating both (i) the refinement of management patterns for individual use cases and (ii) the execution of the refined solutions: we introduce Automated Management Idioms to refine patterns automatically and extend an existing management framework to generate executable management workflows based on these refinements. We validate the presented approach by a prototypical implementation to prove its technical feasibility and evaluate its extensibility, standards compliance, and complexity.