Common Technical Understanding of Business Process as a Service #

This wiki tries to achieve a common technical understanding of Business Process as a Service including the intended usage. involved persons (roles), and technical requirements/constraints. In all cases, we strictly separate the use of the platform from the technical concepts that realise its functionality. This section also introduces a set of abbreviations that are summarised on the Glossary page.

Business Processes vs Workflows #

aa

Business Process as a Service #

Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) represents an Internet-based service where different users (so far unspecified) can register business processes, register implementations for business processes, select, annotate, and enact these processes or groups thereof.

From the view of the NIST definition, BPaaS is either a special form of Software as a Service or a very limited form of Platform as a Service (cf. Cloud Service Models and NIST Standard).

CloudSocket #

In that sense, CloudSocket is a software platform that enables BPaaS.

A cloud providers that offers the CloudSocket service runs a CloudSocket Instance and is called CloudSocket Provider. From a functional point of view, CloudSocket is equipped with a Business Process Marketplace (Design Repository) that provides access to existing pre-defined business processes as well as to implementations thereof. The CloudSocket platform consists of four key environments: design, allocation, execution, evaluation. 

Design Environment #

A graphical modeller provides access to business processes from the design repository and enables the semantic annotation of Busines Process Models, as well as workflows.The semantic annotations capture for instance the possibility to impose performance constraints and further non-functional requirements on the business process as well as on individual tasks within this process. This environment outputs a modelled business process with semantic annotations.

The model will typically be defined in BPMN, BPMN 2.0, or Abstract BPEL programmes. 

Users and Roles #

End user

X user

Y user

Where is the Cloud in CloudSocket? #

Besides the aaS naming that is typically used for anything that is (supposed to be) offered in a cloud-like manner, cloud systems are commonly defined by capabilities beyond the naming. Again, referring to the NIST standard, these capabilities are mainly:

• On-demand self-service. A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service provider.
  

• Broad network access. Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and workstations).
  

• Resource pooling. The provider’s computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand. There is a sense of location independence in that the customer generally has no control or knowledge over the exact location of the provided resources but may be able to specify location at a higher level of abstraction (e.g., country, state, or datacenter). Examples of resources include storage, processing, memory, and network bandwidth.
  

• Rapid elasticity. Capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released, in some cases automatically, to scale rapidly outward and inward commensurate with demand. To the consumer, the capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be appropriated in any quantity at any time.
  

• Measured service. Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capabilityat some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored, controlled, and reported, providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of the utilized service

MISC #

T2.2 Common Technical Understanding of Business Process as a Service [UULM]
This task is concerned with creating documents like public WIKI pages, BPaaS taxonomies and explaining background material in order to create a common understanding with respect to technical realisation for business process as a service in the cloud. The starting point is the Business-process and IT alignment Wiki based on the Zachmann framework and describing business process and IT relevant modelling languages. This addresses four communities: (1) the business process management community addressing BPaaS - Design by providing definitions, standards tools, approaches and samples. Business and IT alignment aspects are considered via semantic lifting of business process models, IT infrastructure model, workflow models and cloud service component models; (2) for the BPaaS Allocation a model-driven approach in order to create BPaaS Cloudlets is described by elaborating the use of UML concept models, semantics and smart mechanisms to check the consistency and correctness. (3) for the BPaaS execution the workflow and SOA community providers the computer orchestration view point with standards and tools. Multi-cloud access and the service management across several cloud-infrastructures are described and approaches are pointed out; (4) the BPaaS Evaluation Environment defines how QoS and SLA need to be lifted to QoBP and how meta model extraction can be used for process monitoring in a multi-Cloud environment.

In addition the concept of “Conceptual Analytics” that uses any semantically lifted conceptual meta model to map extracted meta data form process monitor logs is elaborated. The aim of this task is create a starting point for creating a common understanding. Hence main effort is to collect, describe and explain all used concepts not only for the consortium members but mainly for other cooperative projects, so that applied principles, methods and approaches are clearly explained to be easily identified for other projects and third party member.

This Wiki offers a BPaaS taxonomy as well as an explanation of background material in order to create a common understanding with respect to technical realisation for business process as a service in the cloud.

• Business and IT-Cloud alignment

• Taxonomy

• Tools

• Models