Policy-driven governance in cloud service ecosystems

Cloud application development platforms facilitate new models of software co-development and forge environments best characterised as cloud service ecosystems. The value of those ecosystems increases exponentially with the addition of more users and third-party services. Growth however breeds complexity and puts reliability at risk, requiring all stakeholders to exercise control over changes in the ecosystem that may affect them. This is a challenge of governance. From the viewpoint of the ecosystem coordinator, governance is about preventing negative ripple effects from new software added to the platform. From the viewpoint of third-party developers and end-users, governance is about ensuring that the cloud services they consume or deliver comply with requirements on a continuous basis. To facilitate different forms of governance in a cloud service ecosystem we need governance support systems that achieve separation of concerns between the roles of policy provider, governed resource provider and policy evaluator. This calls for better modularisation of the governance support system architecture, decoupling governance policies from policy evaluation engines and governed resources. It also calls for an improved approach to policy engineering with increased automation and efficient exchange of governance policies and related data between ecosystem partners. The thesis supported by this research is that governance support systems that satisfy such requirements are both feasible and useful to develop through a framework that integrates Semantic Web technologies and Linked Data principles. The PROBE framework presented in this dissertation comprises four components: (1) a governance ontology serving as shared ecosystem vocabulary for policies and resources; (2) a method for the definition of governance policies; (3) a method for sharing descriptions of governed resources between ecosystem partners; (4) a method for evaluating governance policies against descriptions of governed ecosystem resources. The feasibility and usefulness of PROBE are demonstrated with the help of an industrial case study on cloud service ecosystem governance.

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