Symptoms Automation Framework (SAF) for Cloud Business Alignment

Symptoms Automation Framework (SAF) for Cloud Business Alignment

OASIS SAF TCWorking Draft 0606 August 2010

This document is an OASIS SAF TC Working Draft. It does not reflect the views of the OASIS SAF TC or of OASIS

Cloud Management ChallengeHuman experts in specific IT infrastructure and business domains possess

substantial knowledge about prevention, remediation, and optimization of systems based on business conditions. The Cloud breaks down opportunities for these experts (often residing in multiple cloud consumers and providers) to collaborate in order to effectively capture, combine, and leverage this silo-ed knowledge across their various multiple domains in an automated fashion.

Thus, while cloud providers will be able to provide standardized management interfaces to control their services, business consumers will be unable to adequately automate and obtain value for their business using these management interfaces.

The SAF is a catalog-based XML collaborative knowledge framework that is designed to address these challenges by automating appropriate responses to changing business conditions and integrating contributions from diverse domains. SAF has applicability to cloud computing (using the SAF Cloud Profile) as well as many other architectures and disciplines.


What is SAF?

An information model and set of architectural roles Describing, recognizing, and reacting

to multi-domain problems/opportunities Enabling vendors, integrators, and

organizations to codify their best practices

And share/automate them in a machine readable, interoperable way


What is SAF?

Information Model Symptom

An event indicating that a business condition is present

Syndrome A rule identifying meaningful pattern of

Symptoms Protocol

An action defining a template to create a Prescription

Prescription a concrete instance of a Protocol

• Typically used for remediation, diagnostics, prevention, or optimization


What is SAF?

Architectural Roles (slightly simplified) Syndrome and Protocol Catalog (a.k.a.

SAF catalog) Domains collaborate by contributing to this

repository Diagnostician

Recognizes conditions by matching Symptoms to Syndromes in the SAF catalog. Identifies related Protocols.

Practitioner Uses Protocols to take actions by creating

Prescriptions Case Manager

Acts as the coordinator of the framework. Directs the actions of the above-mentioned roles as it keeps track of the of Symptoms and the diagnose-prescribe cycle.


Cloud/Business Alignment Scenario Online sales company (and Cloud

Consumer) Multi-domain conditions indicate upcoming

sales surge More web site browsing (operations) A call from a regional sales manager (field

organization) A small increase in online sales system (accounting) Media endorsement (marketing) Lots of buzz in blogs (RSS feeds – independent

service) Problem (business perspective)

Scattered, un-integrated, unleveraged knowledge • What business conditions are relevant and when?• How do we integrate diverse knowledge?• How do we rapidly respond to changing conditions?


Business/Cloud Alignment Scenario Business/IT alignment... How did that work

out in the past? Not well! Problem (general IT perspective)

Widely distributed business/IT knowledge How can business/IT collaborate, analyze &

respond quickly? It’s much more difficult in the cloud!

Simple challenge in this scenario: adjust cloud capacity across multiple systems and providers as needed by each provider... quickly, automatically, appropriately

We can’t meet this challenge! Cloud capacity is not ready to handle the sudden rise! Business unresponsive... Lost profit...

Let’s revisit the scenario with SAF...


consumer provider

catalogue

* These are roles in the framework, not necessarily people! They will usually be software entities.** The Catalogue, Diagnostician, and Practitioner(s) could be implemented in various ways, e.g. Provider provides the Catalogue and Practitioner, and the Consumer the Diagnostician.

A Cloud consumer wants to do business with a Cloud provider. They will use SAF

to bridge their knowledge domains. Consumer will also use SAF to merge data from the many different business

aspects.


consumer provider

catalogue

Let’s collaborate to understand each other better!

Cool! I’ll provide a SAF catalogue where we can link your business concepts to my

cloud operations



consumer provider

catalogue

I will provide an action (Protocol) template that modifies server capacity –since I

know how to do this.



consumer provider

catalogue

I also have the ability to emit Symptoms about server outages. I’ll add patterns (Syndromes) to the catalogue to match

these types of Symptoms (similar to events) .



consumer provider

catalogue

And since I know my business, I will provide a Syndrome to identify important business conditions

For example, I will merge descriptions (Syndromes) from all my departments and external sources pertaining to my sales...

...so that I can identify potential sudden increase in my sales!



consumer provider

catalogue

Finally, I will associate Syndromes to the actions (Protocols) that you have provided. In other words, map

business decisions to desired responses.

For example, if my “Sales Increase Syndrome” is triggered, I’ll invoke your Protocol to

increase my server capacity!



consumer provider

diagnostician

catalogue


I work for the consumer, and I’ll be constantly and iteratively checking

incoming data (Symptoms) to see if I identify some important business

condition (Syndrome)!

I work for the provider, and I will be “implementing” Prescriptions

relevant to him.

practitioner

For example, I will be arranging to increase server capacity whenever

needed.*Although the Diagnostician is supplied by the Consumer in this example to show the flexibility of SAF, it will typically be supplied

by the Provider along with Catalogue authoring tools, so as

to increase the service value provided to the customers

sisaiadis

move the Diagnostician to the provider side


consumer provider

diagnostician

operations

marketing

catalogue

sales

3rd part news analysis


practitioner

This is the operations department. We will automatically be emitting low level

Symptoms with web site browsing rates

This is the sales department. We will periodically emit Symptoms with the rate

of shop sales

This is marketing. I will manually emit Symptoms over email or phone

whenever near-term our forecasts change.

I am a contractor service provider. I analyze news and RSS feeds and send statistics on the ‘buzz’/hype about the

company

*Some Symptoms will be low level mechanically produced (web site

hits) while other high level ones can be derived or be manually emitted (marketing calls). Some emitters

may not even know they participate in SAF –merely sending data or

notifications around!


consumer provider

diagnostician

operations

marketing

catalogue

sales



practitioner

with all the roles introduced, and the Catalogue collaboratively filled in by Consumer and Provider, this merged

environment begins to operate iteratively under normal business conditions, when at some point an

interesting situation appears...


consumer provider

diagnostician

operations

marketing

catalogue

sales


Web site browsing has gone up!

Call: CEO interviewed and endorsed on CNN!


practitioner


consumer provider

diagnostician

operations

marketing

catalogue

sales


Store sales have upward trend


practitioner

There is lots of talk/buzz/hype about the company in the blogosphere!


consumer provider

diagnostician

operations

marketing

catalogue

sales


Combining all this info (Symptoms), I found the business condition (Syndrome) of

potential sudden, large increase in sales!

I’ll use the relevant Protocol to create and send a Prescription to the practitioner to increase

server capacity!* These are roles in the framework, not necessarily people! They will usually be software entities.

** The Catalogue, Diagnostician, and Practitioner(s) could be implemented in various ways, e.g. Provider provides the Catalogue and Practitioner, and the Consumer the Diagnostician.

practitioner


consumer provider

diagnostician

operations

marketing

catalogue

sales


I know how to increase capacity cause I run in the Cloud Provider’s

infrastructure. I can be anything from a script to a BPEL process. It

doesn’t matter.


practitioner


consumer provider

diagnostician

operations

marketing

catalogue

sales



practitioner

Here you are, I’ve provided some more servers proactively so you can

accommodate the anticipated growth!


SAF for Cloud Business Alignment With SAF

Consumers can map their business conditions to Cloud management operations

It becomes possible to blend information from many domains and for automation to act on that information


SAF for Cloud Business Alignment Benefits for cloud consumer

Improved operations and understanding by merging info from different business aspects

Better positioned to accommodate sudden business changes (also threats, etc.)

Cloud provider actions maps naturally to business requirements of consumer

Benefits for cloud provider Significant differentiator and value added capabilities Automated and improved responses to meet changing

customer needs


Invitation More use cases for SAF Cloud Profiles

Cloud business conditions (for Syndromes) Cloud provider interfaces (for Protocols)

So we can map to diverse provider capabilities Validation of our Cloud use cases Use cases for other SAF profiles

e.g., identity, policy management, QoS, financial, etc.

Join the OASIS SAF Technical Committee


TC Chairs (contacts) Stavros Isaiadis, Fujitsu (SAF TC Co-chair)

[email protected] Jeff Vaught, CA (SAF TC Co-chair)

[email protected]

OASIS SAF Technical Committee http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/saf/

Current Working Documents http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/documents.php?wg_abbrev=saf

Information and Contacts

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/saf/

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/documents.php?wg_abbrev=saf