Towards AiP as a Service: An Agent Based Approach for Outsourcing Business Processes to Cloud Computing Services

The challenges that Cloud computing poses to business processes integration, emphasize the need for addressing two major issues: (i) which integration approach should be used allowing an adequate description of interaction aspects of the composed software components ? (ii) how are these interaction descriptions stored and shared to allow other software artifacts to (re)use them ? To address these issues, in this paper the authors propose an Agent Interaction Protocols (AiP)-based approach for reusing and aggregating existing Cloud services to create a new desired business application. The proposed approach facilitates rapid development and provisioning of composite Cloud services by specifying what to compose as an AiP. Furthermore, the authors develop an agent-based architecture that supports flexible scaling of business processes in a virtualized Cloud computing environment. The main goal of the proposed architecture is to address and tackle interoperability challenges at the Cloud application level. It solves the interoperability issues between heterogeneous Cloud services environments by offering a harmonized API. Also, it enables the deployment of applications at public, private or hybrid multi-Cloud environments.