ENVISAGE · Engineering Virtualized Services

Software services are virtualized if they can adapt to the elasticity of cloud computing. To foster the industrial adoption of virtualized services, it is necessary to address two important problems: (1) the efficient analysis, dynamic composition and deployment of services with qualitative and quantitative service levels and (2) the dynamic control of resources such as storage and processing capacities according to the internal policies of the services. ENVISAGE plans to overcome these problems by leveraging service-level agreements (SLA) into software models and resource management into the early phases of service design.<br/>ENVISAGE develops a semantic foundation for virtualization and SLA that goes beyond today's cloud technologies. This foundation makes it possible to efficiently develop SLA-aware and scalable services, supported by highly automated analysis tools using formal methods. SLA-aware services are able to control their own resource management and renegotiate SLA across the heterogeneous virtualized computing landscape.<br/>The main outcome of the ENVISAGE project is a practical open-source framework for model-based development of virtualized services that includes (1) a behavioral specification language for describing resource-aware models; (2) a simulator with visualization facilities; and (3) tool support for automated resource analysis, validation of SLA, code generation, and runtime monitoring of SLA for deployed services.<br/>The consortium has the complementary expertise required by this challenging research agenda, with leading researchers in formal methods, contract-based specification, service-oriented computing and resource analysis, and with industries in different business domains developing cutting edge ICT technologies based on virtualized services.<br/>The methodology and tools developed in ENVISAGE will allow services to be delivered in a more effective, efficient, and reliable manner than today, accelerating the development cycle and lowering the operational costs for innovative networked services that make use of cloud computing. This has the potential to significantly improve the competitiveness of SMEs, and profoundly influence business ICT strategies in all sectors.