Policy-Aware Provisioning and Management of Cloud Applications

Abstract—The automated provisioning and management of com-posite Cloud applications is a major issue and of vital importance in Cloud Computing. It is key to enable properties such as elasticity and pay-per-use. The functional aspects of provisioning and management such as instantiating virtual machines or updat-ing software components are covered by various technologies on different technical levels. However, currently available solutions are tightly coupled to individual technologies without being able to consider non-functional security requirements in a non-proprietary and interoperable way. In addition, due to their heterogeneity, the integration of these technologies in order to benefit from their individual strengths is a major problem— especially if non-functional aspects have to be considered and integrated, too. In this article, we present a concept that enables executing management tasks using different heterogeneous man-agement technologies in compliance with non-functional security requirements specified by policies. We extend the Management Planlet Framework by a prototypical implementation of the concept and evaluate the approach by several case studies