A Flexible Architecture for Service Management in the Cloud

Cloud computing is a style of computing where different capabilities are provided as a service to customers using Internet technologies. The most common offered services are Infrastructure (IasS), Software (SaaS) and Platform (PaaS). This work integrates the service management into the cloud computing concept and shows how management can be provided as a service in the cloud. Nowadays, services need to adapt their functionalities across heterogeneous environments with different technological and administrative domains. The implied complexity of this situation can be simplified by a service management architecture in the cloud. This paper focuses on this architecture, taking into account specific service management functionalities, like incident management or KPI/SLA management, and provides a complete solution. The proposed architecture is based on a distributed set of agents, using semantic-based techniques: a Shared Knowledge Plane, instantiated in the cloud, has been introduced to ensure communication between agents.