CloudSocket Process Levels  #

CloudSocket distinguishes three levels of process definitions entitles Level-I to Level-III that are shown in the figure below. Each of these processes is created and consumed by one of the CloudSocket actors.

Level-I: Business Process Model #

The business process modell is defined either by the web modeller or the hybrid BPaaS modeller. It contains a business process definition consisting of individual tasks. In accordance wihth the Business Process defintion, this model is business-oriented and does not contain any technical implementation or aspects.

This business process model is enriched with semantic annotations  that eases the semantic lifting at later stages of the project.

Level-II: Executable Business Process Model #

The executable process model is defined in the Design Environment. Each Level-II process realises a Level-I process, but a Level-I process may be realised by more than one Level-II process (or none). A Level-II process has replaced business-oriented Tasks with technical-oriented orchestration of service invocations. The services have been defined in an abstract manner. That is, the service interface and the semantics have been fixed and so is the invocation sequence (order) of the services (better: service interfaces). At the same time, the actual service instance that shall be used when a process has been triggered and a process instance been created, is not defined yet.

Just as the Level-I business process can be enriched with semantic annotations, this is possible for the Level-II process as well.

Level-III: CloudSocket Cloudlet\\ #

A CloudSocket Cloudlet (not to be confused with a FHoster Cloudlet) is created in the Allocation environment. Here, the service interfaces from the Level-II process get bound to concrete service instances provided by third parties or to software components that provide the same interface, but have to be self-hosted by the execution environment together with the BPaaS hosting.

Also Level-III processes can be semantically enriched in order to help the execution environment when deploying them.