Rule Based System and Conflicts

Marking the cloud entities will enable customers to mark the entities with all possible metadata about the entity like its size, location, owner, data center to which it belongs to, the cost center to which it should be charged to, the applications belonging to it, etc, without worrying about the actual inventory view of cloud. It will also enable solutions to use this information to perform tasks/actions based on a combination of these attributes set. To perform the actions, solutions allow users to define rules, based on the attributes. However, if a large number of rules are defined, such rules can conflict and result in the solution performing multiple actions on the same entity without the actual intention of the user, or worse, crashing of the solution. Hence, defining rules needs to be restricted or at least the customer should be warned if creation of a rule can potentially result in conflict. Through this paper, we present a solution to detect conflict among rules. The solution is generic and can be easily integrated with any other solution.