Cloud system management is complex due to their diversity and frequent runtime changes. Cloud systems were previously managed through cloud specific management tools that focus on optimising technical metrics, such as performance. However, business users care business metrics (such as cost and revenue) more than technical metrics. To address these issues, this paper proposes a unified business-driven cloud management framework, which enables optimisation of business metrics without limiting business to a specific cloud provider. The main contributions include: (1) a taxonomy which defines a set of actions, events and metrics for unified cloud management; (2) a cloud management policy language that specifies cloud management policies from a business perspective; and (3) middleware architecture that allows business-driven management of diverse clouds. The proposed solutions are evaluated in terms of feasibility, functional correctness, generality, usefulness, and performance.

While cloud computing is now embraced by many organizations, its increased use in practice has led to the identification of a number of limitations. For example, security and privacy are still major roadblocks for cloud adoption, elasticity of cloud computing is not as instantaneous in practice as hyped by marketing, mobility of consumers is not yet addressed completely, etc. While some of these issues will be soon addressed by innovations from academic or industrial research, there are also important challenges that might require fundamental improvements in cloud computing. In particular, a number of consumer applications require security, dependability, or quality of service (QoS) as fundamental features that are built in from the start, instead of being "add-ons." On the other hand, the next-generation Internet communication architecture (e.g., from projects on the Internet of Things, the Future Internet, etc.) will also influence cloud computing in the future. These and other challenges and opportunities will soon lead to a new generation of cloud computing systems. This EDOC 2012 discussion session will brainstorm possible features of next-generation cloud computing systems from two-directions: a) by identifying requirements and challenges for overcoming fundamental problems of the current cloud computing systems, b) by pointing out possible visionary architectures of next-generation systems. All EDOC 2012 participants are encouraged to contribute to this discussion. At the beginning of the session, the moderator will give a short introductory presentation to kick-start the discussion, but other participants can also deliver short introductory statements (previously approved by the moderator). Then, an open-ended discussion will explore in more depth some of the key concerns and most provoking ideas raised by the participants. At the conclusion, some of the "to do" items for research towards next-generation cloud computing will be summarized.

Runtime adaptation of Web service compositions can often be done in several ways, so it is necessary to decide which adaptation approach to take. While many research projects studied runtime adaptation of Web service compositions or business processes, this paper presents our unique solutions that maximize business metrics, in cases when several Web service composition instances should be adapted at the same time. We specify all necessary information about possible adaptations and their business metrics as policies in our WS-Policy4MASC language and model the optimization problem in the powerful constraint programming language MiniZinc. Into our MiniZnMASC middleware we integrated new algorithms that determine how to adapt each Web service composition instance so the total business value is maximized, while satisfying all given constraints (e.g., about resource limitations). Experiments with the MiniZnMASC prototype showed that our solutions are feasible, functionally correct, business beneficial, with low performance overhead, and with linear scalability.

Without careful methodological guidance, case studies in software engineering are difficult to plan, design and execute. While there are a number of broad guidelines for case study research, there are none that specifically address the needs of a software engineer undertaking multiple case studies in an industrial setting. Through a synthesis of existing best practices in case study research, we provide a set of comprehensive guidelines for conducting multiple case studies in software engineering research. Our guidelines can assist software engineering researchers with all stages of multiple case study research, although in this paper we concentrate on the early phases, such as focusing the case study and detailed plan design. To date, three exploratory research projects found our guidelines very useful. We illustrate our guidelines with examples from one of these projects.

Our research group at NICTA was approached by LIXI, a standardization body of the Australian lending (e.g., mortgage) industry to help improve their business processes. We have been working on developing better approaches for business process modeling and on inventing new techniques for business process interoperation on a very large (industry-wide) scale. We studied a number of modern modeling languages and tools, as well as implementation technologies (e.g., SOAP and RESTful Web services). Then, we defined reference business process models and developed reference architectures and implementations for interoperable cross-organizational lending business processes. Our solutions have been adopted in practice. Insights and results from this project are transferable to other vertical domains.

Many industries have been developing e-business standards to improve business-to-business interoperability on a mass scale. Most such standards are composed of business data models with some message exchange patterns. Such data-only standards leave a very large interpretation space for the implementation stage at each individual organization. Thus, true industry-wide interoperability is still hard to achieve. In this industry report, we describe our experiences in creating and evaluating reference architectures for the Australian lending industry. To achieve the right level of prescriptiveness, our reference architectures are deliberately non-structural. Instead, they are based on a set of quality-centric architectural rules. We devised new methods for analyzing interoperability and evaluating such industry-level reference architectures. The first reference architecture has now been adopted and achieved positive effects. We also summarize several other lessons we learned, such as the need to align reference architectures with industry structures.

We present a software development approach that aligns a requirements elicitation technique with a formal method of software specification abstraction. The goal/strategy modeling technique Map augmented with Jackson's context diagrams (representing environment) is used to elicit requirements and the B-method is used to translate Map requirements into formal specifications. Comprehensive tool support allows the B-method to refine and implement the specification correctly. Our approach brings improvement to an approach that uses generic requirements for rigorous software development. The resulting specification model bridges the gap between software requirements and formal specifications and supports automatic refinement of strategic requirements into software code. To illustrate how our approach bridges this gap, we discuss the Point of Sale (PoS) requirements model of Seven Eleven Japan (SEJ).

Summary form only given, as follows. The dramatic growth of e-commerce and the reliance of organizations’ success on quality of their Web systems have required the need for building high quality Web-based applications with minimum time and effort. Therefore, Web application’s quality measurements and metrics are becoming increasingly important. Although many quality metric models for Webbased applications have been proposed, they introduced a set of (relatively) ambiguous guidelines and rules and were not validated theoretically and empirically. We propose a Time-Quality metric model for Web-based systems quality measurement that: (1) is based on a set of Web quality characteristics defined by the ISO 9126 standard, (2) uses the percentage contribution of each characteristic (i.e., the importance weight of each characteristic) to determine the web quality, and (3) considers the impact of development time (using the WebMo model as measurement for Web system development time) on quality of a Web-based system. The model consists of two measurement phases: first the percentage contribution of each quality characteristic and the development time for a Web system are initially estimated using predefined formulas, and then same measurements are carried out after the system is built. The quality of the developed system is then adjusted by the development time factor. We argue that a Web-based quality measurement model should consider the development time as a key impact on the quality of Web systems, in addition to a set of essential quality characteristics. The model is used to evaluate a real-world Web application example, which illustrates its applicability. The example shows how the total quality of the Web system is affected. Although the model quantifies a set of quality characteristics and introduced mathematical formulas for measuring quality of Web applications, it suffers from subjectivity used in evaluating quality characteristics, which could lead to imprecision in measurement. Further, it has to consider other measurement quality factors, such as consumption of different resources that a Web application could interact with during run-time. The noticed limitations are topics of our ongoing and future work.

WS-Policy 4MASC is an XML language for specification of policies for run-time Web service management (monitoring and control) activities executed by the manageable and adaptable services compositions (MASC) middleware. Among its original contributions are specification of diverse business values (benefits or costs, tangible or intangible, agreed or possible, absolute or relative) and specification of various control strategies maximizing different business values (e.g., only agreed intangible benefits). To facilitate development of Web service systems that can be managed with WS-Policy 4MASC and the MASC middleware and to improve alignment between run-time management activities and design-time models, we developed novel UML profiles for WS-Policy 4MASC. Their original contributions are in improved support for: a) specification of run-time management activities and business values within design-time models, b) automatic creation of run-time management policies from design- time models, c) feedback of run-time management information values into analysis of design-time models. We validated our solutions on detailed examples.

MASC (manageable and adaptive service compositions) is a policy-based middleware for monitoring of Web service compositions and their dynamic adaptation to various runtime changes. MASC policies are described in our new WS-Policy extension called WS-Policy4MASC. Compared with recent related works, MASC has several distinctive characteristics, such as coordination of adaptation on the SOAP messaging layer and the business process orchestration layer, use of both technical and business metrics for adaptation decisions, and extending the power and flexibility of the new Microsoft .NET 3.0 platform. In this paper, we focus on MASC support for adaptation to address business exceptions and manage runtime faults. For example, a sub-process (or an activity) can be added, deleted, replaced, skipped, or retried. We have been implementing a MASC proof-of-concept prototype and evaluating it on adaptation scenarios from a stock trading case study. Our performance studies of the prototype indicate that overheads introduced by MASC are acceptable.

Web services are gaining acceptance as a standards-based approach for integrating loosely coupled services often distributed over a network. Hence, achieving high levels of reliability and availability in spite of service or infrastructure failures poses unique set of challenges. However, Web services middleware provide limited constructs for specifying faults detection and recovery actions. Additionally, faults-handling logic often gets scattered and tangled with the service logic. Consequently, this negatively impacts maintainability and adaptability. To address these requirements for reliable and fault tolerant Web services execution, we propose set extensible recovery policies to declaratively specify how to handle and recover from typical faults in Web services composition. The identified constructs were incorporated into a lightweight service management middleware named MASC (manageable and adaptive service composition) to transparently enact the fault management policies and facilitate the monitoring, configuration and control of managed services. Several experimental results with a service based supply chain management system illustrate the effectiveness of our approach to providing reliable and uninterrupted services

The management of Extensible Markup Language (XML) Web services executing in mobile and/or embedded environments poses new challenges that result from the limited availability of computing resources and from the need for characteristic management activities, such as handling context sensitivity. This paper briefly describes management requirements for and design of our management infrastructure for monitoring of mobile/embedded Web services. Its architecture is based on extending a SOAP engine with management modules, an approach adopted by several existing tools for monitoring non-mobile/non-embedded Web services. Apart for modules for management of non-mobile/non-embedded Web services, our infrastructure contains additional support for handling context-sensitivity, disruptions in quality of service (QoS), and intermittent connectivity. We have been implementing the proof-of-concept prototype of this infrastructure as an extension of the Web Service Offerings Infrastructure (WSOI).

We suggest that the composition of Web services is an activity that needs to be managed, and that Web service composition management is distinct from the management of individual Web services. We describe a set of requirements to help make this distinction. The four main groups of these requirements are: service discovery, service selection and contract formation, composition verification, composition management. Then, we discuss architectural alternatives (centralized, federated, and peer-to-peer) for a Web service composition management framework.

Summary form only given. This tutorial will introduce the participants to the area of QoS specification and management for XML Web services. It will explain the importance of this topic and why the widely used basic Web service technologies are not enough. Further, it will give an overview of a number of languages developed for QoS specification for Web services, as well as a number of research infrastructures, industrial products, and standardization proposals that offer some forms of QoS management for Web services. The achieved results and open topics for future research will be critically analyzed.

Our Web Service Offerings Language (WSOL) enables formal specification of important management information - classes of service (modeled as service offerings), various types of constraint (functional, QoS, access rights), and management statements (e.g., prices, penalties, and management responsibilities) - for XML (Extensible Markup Language) Web services. To demonstrate the usefulness of WSOL for the management of Web services and their compositions, we have developed a corresponding management infrastructure, the Web Service Offerings Infrastructure (WSOI). WSOI enables monitoring and accounting of WSOL service offerings and their dynamic manipulation. To support monitoring of WSOL service offerings, we have extended the Apache Axis open-source SOAP engine with WSOI-specific modules, data structures, and management ports. To support dynamic manipulation of WSOL service offerings, we have developed appropriate algorithms, protocols, and management port types and built into WSOI modules and data structures for their implementation. Apart from provisioning of WSOL-enabled Web services, we are using WSOI to perform experiments comparing dynamic manipulation of WSOL service offerings and alternatives.

The concept of a Web service, as defined by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), represents a distributed component using XML messaging. Compositions of Web services are increasingly used to create new IT capabilities fast and flexibly, in an ad hoc manner. This work extends the W3C concept of a Web service in two ways. First, we enable a Web service to offer several variations of service and QoS. In other words, we add the concept of classes of service for Web services. This widens the usability of a particular Web service. Second, we explore dynamic (i.e., run-time) adaptation and management based on the manipulation of classes of service. Our dynamic adaptation mechanisms include switching, deactivation/reactivation, and creation of classes of service. Management and dynamic adaptation of Web service compositions further improve the overall flexibility and adaptability of IT systems using Web services.