Configuring Cloud-Service Interfaces Using Flow Inheritance

Pavel Zaichenkov
(University of Hertfordshire)
Olga Tveretina
(University of Hertfordshire)
Alex Shafarenko
(University of Hertfordshire)

Technologies for composition of loosely-coupled web services in a modular and flexible way are in high demand today. On the one hand, the services must be flexible enough to be reused in a variety of contexts. On the other hand, they must be specific enough so that their composition may be provably consistent. The existing technologies (WS-CDL, WSCI and session types) require a behavioural contract associated with each service, which is impossible to derive automatically. Furthermore, neither technology supports flow inheritance: a mechanism that automatically and transparently propagates data through service pipelines. This paper presents a novel mechanism for automatic interface configuration of such services. Instead of checking consistency of the behavioural contracts, our approach focuses solely on that of data formats in the presence of subtyping, polymorphism and flow inheritance. The paper presents a toolchain that automatically derives service interfaces from the code and performs interface configuration taking non-local constraints into account. Although the configuration mechanism is global, the services are compiled separately. As a result, the mechanism does not raise source security issues despite global service availability in adaptable form.

In Razieh Behjati and Ahmed Elmokashfi: Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Formal Methods for and on the Cloud (iFMCloud 2016), Reykjavik, Iceland, 4th June 2016, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 228, pp. 27–34.
Published: 25th October 2016.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.228.4 bibtex PDF

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