A Semantic Approach to Automate Service Management in the Cloud

Virtualized service models are now emerging and re-defining the way information technology is delivered. Managing these services efficiently over the cloud is an open challenge. In this paper, we describe an integrated methodology for the lifecycle of IT services delivered on the cloud. We have divided the IT service lifecycle into five phases of requirements, discovery, nego-tiation, composition, and consumption. We detail each phase and list the high level ontologies that we have developed for them. We also describe a prototype system that we have developed using Semantic Web technologies to represent and reason about ser-vices and service requirements. This methodology complements previous work on ontologies for service descriptions in that it is focused on supporting negotiation for the particulars of a service and going beyond simple matchmaking.