Model-Driven Management of Services

Applications are increasingly composed of remote services provided by independent parties. This distributed ownership makes it problematic to measure and control quality of service indicators. Management activities must become an integral part of the system´s development process, from requirements elicitation, where users identify the quality dimensions of interest, to the implementation, where the actual composition must be paired with suitable means for its run-time management. This paper presents MDMS (Model-Driven Management of Services), a model-driven approach for engineering manageable services. The approach supports the explicit modeling of quality dimensions, management objectives, and key performance indicators, and the transformations required to exploit these concepts at runtime. The methodology is supported by ECo Ware, an innovative prototype framework for the deployment and operation of managed services.