A Modeling Profile for Availability Analysis of Composite Cloud Services

Service Oriented Architectures and service-centric models arose in the last years as a standard de-facto in IT enterprises for offering practically any kind of services to users world-wide. Heterogeneity (of operating systems, programming languages, software and hardware infrastructures etc.) and transparency (for users) are the key issues of the actual trends in developing and providing services. In particular Cloud-based models provide means for realizing and distributing everything-as-a-service, including infrastructures, hardware and software platforms and services. Even if at the moment Service-centric models and technologies are mature in the IT scenario, Composition, analysis and validation of Cloud services is an open research challenge. In this work we describe a methodology based on Multi-Agent Models which allows for description, composition and verification of requirements of Cloud-based services. The methodology uses a modeling profile able to describe services as agents in a multi-agent environment and it is based on Model Driven Engineering (MDE) techniques. The proposed methodology includes a verification process for requirements that exploits formal methods during the whole life cycle of services. An example of the application of the proposed techniques will be reported also.