Accountability as a Service for the Cloud: From Concept to Implementation with BPEL

Summary form only given. Accountability in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a capability of making business processes across all participants (services, applications and people) accountable in terms of both business logic and Quality of Services (QoS). While accountability is a critical mechanism to enhance trust between collaborative services, there is the lack of standard accountability support in the current SOA infrastructure. For example, it is difficult with the existing technologies/infrastructure to resolve a dispute between two (web) services if some interactions between the two services go wrong; there is also little existing accountability support for a service consumer to collect quantity evidences to complain a service provider, who fails to meet its Service Level Agreement (SLA). As the increasing real-world activities are performed through the Internet connected services, we envision that there will be growing requirements for making the behaviors of both service providers and consumers accountable. In the business world, one may be reluctant to transact directly with a stranger. But a mutually trusted middleman can be used to facilitate transactions and resolve possible disputes. In this tutorial, we will share our observations and research results on building accountability into SOA. First, we will review related work on accountability in traditional distributed systems, ranging from Internet protocols and network file systems to outsourced database management systems. We will examine what methods embodied in these work can fit service computing in Internet scale and what cannot. Then we will present our research work on middleman-based approach to delivering accountability as a service, including our recent research results. This tutorial will focus on the major technical challenges of enabling SOA accountable and our solutions to these challenges. Finally, we will demonstrate our solutions using a collaborative services scenario deployed in - - Amazon EC^2 cloud. The goal of this tutorial is to provide detailed understanding of accountability issues and related technologies in SOA with in-depth related work discussions, recent research outcomes and a deployed accountability service prototype.