Policy-driven governance in cloud application platforms: an ontology-based approach

The emergence of cloud computing is changing the way in which software services are delivered and consumed. In a complex ecosystem of virtualised, interlinked applications and services, there is a greatly increased need for cloud platform operators to control the quality and standards of software offered on their platforms by enforcing different kinds of policy. Existing tools for policy-driven governance in service delivery platforms suffer from important limitations. Such tools do not allow policies to be expressed abstractly and to be maintained separately from the low-level code that is written to enforce them, nor allow the relationships among policies or between policies and their subjects to be captured explicitly. We introduce an alternative approach to governance which aims to address those limitations by allowing policies to be represented on the basis of ontologies, and then enforced by a generic and reusable mechanism that employs off-the-shelf logical reasoning engines. The approach extends to different kinds of governance policy and has the advantage of being formal, declarative and fully standards-based, such that cloud platform operators can automate several policy engineering tasks and easily implement changes in the way software lifecycles and artefacts are governed.