Characterizing Service Assurance for Cloud-Based Implementations: Augmenting Assurance via Operations

Abstract

Service assurance remains important for applications with cloud-based implementations, but now must be met via standardized cloud services. To meet custom assurance requirements, consumer controlled operations (e.g., around when to provision and what to provision) factor as integral design components to augment basic assurance of standard cloud services which may be individually less reliable. These operations determine how cloud-based implementations function through periods of increased demand or degradation in the underlying cloud services; they augment cloud's reliability with its agility. However, it is not enough to fix these operations at design time. Unpredictability in today's cloud services occurs not only across providers but over time within a provider. As such, our approach dynamically updates operations in response to monitored cloud conditions. The result enables a characterization of the assurance for the composite service delivered by the cloud-based implementation that factors in and adjusts for operations around procuring underlying cloud services.