Configuration Policy Extraction for Parameter Settings in Cloud Infrastructure Using UML/OCL Verification

To manage cloud computing infrastructures consisting of many servers having a massive number of configuration parameters is quite burdensome for administrators of infrastructures. While some policy-based management approaches have been proposed to maintain the system configuration, it is quite difficult for administrators to define proper configuration policies for parameter settings in large-scale cloud computing infrastructure. To solve this problem, we developed a method of extracting parameter configuration policies from the configuration information of the existing infrastructure using UML/OCL verification. In this method, first we identify the scopes of management from the hierarchical topology of the cloud infrastructure. Next, we execute verifications of two types of OCL constraints (regarding parameter configuration patterns) for the configuration of the infrastructure, while changing the range of the scopes we focus on. By determining whether or not these constraints can be satisfied with some scopes, we extract policies that represent patterns satisfied between parameter settings of servers deployed in a certain range of the scope. Then, we demonstrate that we can derive configuration policies for all of parameters of servers in an actual cloud service infrastructure through a case study.