Model-driven provisioning of application services in hybrid computing environments~☆

摘要

Today, Small and Medium Business Enterprises (SMEs), governments, and universities face accelerated business change, more intense domestic and global competition and increased IT demands. They try to meet new demands through rapid implementation of innovative and inclusive business models while at the same time lowering IT barriers. These demands call for a dynamic computing model that supports rapid innovation for services and their delivery. Cloud computing [1-3], which can be an important component of such a model, is a recent advance wherein IT-related functionalities (e.g., CPU, applications, storage, network, etc.) are provided "as a service" to end-users under a usage-based payment model. In a Cloud computing model, end-users (such as SMEs, governments, and universities) can leverage virtualized application services probably on the fly based on fluctuating requirements and, in doing so, they avoid worry about infrastructure details such as where these resources are hosted or how they are managed. The new computing environment, buoyed by recent advances in the Cloud computing, has resulted in hybrid computing environments comprised of virtualized resources, applications, usage-based payment models, and networked devices. The benefit of such an environment is efficiency and flexibility, through creation of a more dynamic computing environment, where the supported functionalities are no longer fixed or locked to the underlying infrastructure. This offers tremendous automation opportunities in a variety of computing domains including, but not limited to, e-Government, e-Research, e-health and e-Business.