Life cycle and characteristics of services in the world of cloud computing
by G. Breiter
and M. Behrendt
The emerging style of cloud computing provides applications, data,
and information technology resources as services of a network. The
cloud services approach focuses on a positive user experience while
shielding the user from the complexity of the underlying
technology. Each cloud service progresses through a well-defined
life cycle: The cloud service provider defines the cloud services to be
offered and exposes them via a service catalog; service requesters
instantiate the services, which are managed against a set of servicelevel
agreements; and finally the cloud service is destroyed when it
is no longer needed. This paper describes this life cycle and explains
the relationship of managing the life cycle of cloud services to
traditional ITIL® (Information Technology Infrastructure
Library) processes as they are present in many data centers today.
Furthermore, this paper elaborates on ensembles that provide the
hardware infrastructure required to optimally support such flexible
and massively scalable cloud services. An ensemble is an
autonomically managed pool of like resources that exposes only
virtualized resources while hiding the physical infrastructure. This
approach allows growing the physical infrastructure with very little
or no incremental administration costs.
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