Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

3-2011

Publication Title

Cloud Computing: Methodology, System, and Applications

Publisher Name

CRC Press

Abstract

The broader context for this chapter comprises business scenarios requiring resource and/or service composition, such as (intra-company) enterprise application integration (EAI) and (inter-company) web service orchestration. The resources and services involved vary widely in terms of the protocols they support, which typically fall into remote procedure call (RPC)~\citeBirrell84implementingremote, resource-oriented (HTTP~\citeFielding96hypertexttransfer and WEBDAV~\citewebdav) and message-oriented protocols. By recognizing the similarity between web-based resources and the kind of resources exposed in the form of filesystems in operating systems, we have found it feasible to map the former to the latter using a uniform, configurable connector layer. Once a remote resource has been exposed in the form of a local filesystem, one can access the resource programmatically using the operating system\textquoterights standard filesystem application programming interface (API). Taking this idea one step further, one can then aggregate or otherwise orchestrate two or more remote resources using the same standard API. Filesystem APIs are available in all major operating systems. Some of those, most notably, all flavors of UNIX including GNU/Linux, have a rich collection of small, flexible command-line utilities, as well as various inter-process communication (IPC) mechanisms. These tools can be used in scripts and programs that compose the various underlying resources in powerful ways. Further explorations of the role of a filesystem-based connector layer in the enterprise application architecture have lead us to the question whether one can achieve a fully compositional, arbitrarily deep hierarchical architecture by re-exposing the aggregated resources as a single, composite resource that, in turn, can be accessed in the same form as the original resources. This is indeed possible in two flavors: 1) the composite resource can be exposed internally as a filesystem for further local composition; 2) the composite resource is exposed externally as a restful resource for further external composition. We expect the ability hierarchically to compose resources to facilitate the construction of complex, robust resource- and service-oriented software systems, and we hope that concrete case studies will further substantiate our position.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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