A Method to Support Variability of Enterprise Services on the Cloud

Web-business platforms offer business capabilities as enterprise services hosted in a multi-tenant cloud environment. Often there is a need to create heavyweight variants of these enterprise services to support: inherent variability in the underlying business process, industry-specific requirements, globalization concerns and customer-specific requirements. These variability concerns affect both the service interface and the service provider implementation and hence are crosscutting in nature. In this paper, we use principles of aspect-oriented software development to modularize these variability concerns. We also provide an aspect specification scheme to specify these concerns. We propose an approach to create heavyweight service variants centered on a service kernel, which forms a common service core across tenants. Heavyweight service variants are created by weaving aspects into the service kernel. Our approach provides improved governance for the provider while offering maximum flexibility for the consumers.