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.

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 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. 

Managed Entities and Lifecycles\\ #

The overall set-up and functionality as described above yields several entities that require an individual management including their own lifecycle.

1. Business Process Modell whose lifecylce is managed by the Design Environment and changed by he Business Process Modeller
2. Executable Business Process Modell whose lifecycle is managed by the Design Environment and changed by the Executable Business Process Model Publisher
3. Cloudlet, i.e. Workflow including management interface. It is created by the Allocation Environment and later changed/configured by the Execution Environment 
4. Business Process/Workflow instances are created by the Cloudlet and orchestrated by the orchestration engine contained in the Cloudlet

• Business and IT-Cloud alignment

• Taxonomy

• Tools

• Models