On Leveraging Policy-Based Management for Maximizing Business Profit

This paper presents a systematic approach to business and policy driven refinement. It also discusses an implementation of an application-hosting service level agreement (SLA) use case. We make use of a simple application hosting SLA template, for which we derive a low-level policy-based service level specification (SLS). The SLS policy set is then analyzed for static consistency and runtime efficiency. The Static Analysis phase involves several consistency tests introduced to detect and correct errors in the original SLS. The Dynamic analysis phase considers the runtime dynamics of policy execution as part of the policy refinement process. This latter phase aims at optimizing the business profit of the service provider. Through mathematical approximation, we derive three policy scheduling algorithms. The algorithms are then implemented and compared against random and first come first served (FCFS) scheduling. This paper shows, in addition to the systematic refinement process, the importance of analyzing the dynamics of a policy management solution before it is actually implemented. The simulations have been performed using the VS Policy Simulator tool.