Integrated Lifecycle of IT Services in a Cloud Environment

Abstract

Virtualized Service models are now emerging and redefining the way information technology is delivered to end users. Current research is focused on specific pieces like service discovery, composition etc. There is no holistic view of what would constitute a lifecycle of virtualized services delivered on a cloud environment. In this paper, we propose an integrated methodology that covers the entire service lifecycle. We have divided the IT service lifecycle on the cloud into five phases of requirements, discovery, negotiation, composition, and consumption. We describe each phase and it’s sub-phases in detail along with the information that needs to flow between them. We also propose some key metrics that should be tracked for each phase.