ACCORD: Automated Change Coordination across Independently Administered Cloud Services

It is very hard to coordinate changes across independently administered cloud services in a dependable manner due to several features of its service-oriented architecture: (i) services are often unaware of how a change will affect other services; (ii) impacted services may respond to changes in diverse ways; and (iii) the asynchronous nature of cross-service communication can introduce subtle errors. To tackle these challenges, our major contribution in this paper is a platform for Automated Change COoRDination (ACCORD) across independently administered cloud services. ACCORD (i) provides the abstractions and protocols for services to explicitly register direct dependencies on shared resources and automatically tracks cross-service transitive dependencies; (ii) allows each service to specify custom change coordination policies; and (iii) enables dependable change coordination in several real-world use-cases with minimal overhead to cloud administrators.