DC Proposal: Automation of Service Lifecycle on the Cloud by Using Semantic Technologies

Managing virtualized services efficiently over the cloud is an open challenge. We propose a semantically rich, policy-based framework to automate the lifecycle of cloud services. We have divided the IT service lifecycle into the five phases of requirements, discovery, negotiation, composition, and consumption. We detail each phase and describe the high level ontologies that we have developed to describe them. Our research complements previous work on ontologies for service descriptions in that it goes beyond simple matchmaking and is focused on supporting negotiation for the particulars of IT services.