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Cloud Computing management                                          2


                                                      Appendix III


                                         Summary of SES and SMI concepts
                            (This appendix does not form an integral part of this Recommendation.)

            This Recommendation makes reference to various software enabled service (SES) and service management
            interface (SMI) concepts as developed in the TM Forum. This appendix is intended to provide a further
            informative introduction to these concepts; however reference should be made to the relevant TM Forum
            specifications for all technical details.

            III.1   Software enabled service (SES)

            A software enabled service is a service that exposes a management interface in addition to its functional
            interface (FI). Just like a router or switch exposes a simple network management protocol (SNMP) or other
            style management interface here we are referring to a digital service. However, since a digital service, such
            as represented by a Platform as a Service (PaaS) workload, is hosted on a virtualized cloud infrastructure, the
            cloud platform must enable the SMI for each instance of a given service/role at a given point in time. An SES
            may represent a physical device, a "software" instance, or indeed a distributed function that has no single
            location or instance.
            The TM Forum developed the concept of SES to provide a means to allow consistent end to end management
            and metering of services exposed by and across different service provider's domains and technologies, such
            as  communication  or  Web  2.0  services.  The  TM  Forum  specifications  are  intended  to  support  business
            practices  associated with multi-provider  cooperation  throughout  the  lifecycle  of  the  service  and this  by
            means of lightweight design to foster wide adoption of the standard artefacts in any architecture, technology
            environment and service domain.

            Management interfaces today are siloed per technology, standardized by specific SDOs or implemented by
            vendors as proprietary implementations. This renders the consistent management of services sourced from
            different domains as challenging.

            The SES management approach proposes a way to allow consistent access to the software components for
            operations, administration and maintenance (OAM) tasks. This consistent access is achieved by incorporating
            the service management interface (SMI) in addition to the functional interface (FI) definition that is part of
            software component creation.

            III.2   Service management interface (SMI)
            In the context of managing an SES, the SMI concept delivers the ability to configure, activate or suspend a
            service instance and to receive or be notified of any kind of metrics, health state and detailed information
            about eventual failures, independent of the underlying technology or architecture.
            Perhaps the best way to think of the SMI is as a simple "base class" in object oriented software development
            that  defines the  core  management  interface  that can  then  be  inherited  by  specific  interface classes  for
            specific purposes. The base SMI provides the set of operations supported by management objects, which can
            then be implemented using various management protocols.

            The following operations are exposed on the SMI:
            •       Activation of an SES: Making the SES available for a particular context (deploying the SES)
            •       Provisioning of an SES: Configuring the settings of an SES or an SES instance
            •       State  monitoring  of  an  SES:  Querying  the  history  and  current  status  in  terms  of  life  cycle
                    management (for a specific instance of the SES) and listening for status updates
            •       Usage monitoring of an SES: Querying for usage metrics from the SES instance or listening for usage
                    metrics reports or alarms (e.g., if metrics conditions imply notifications)
            •       Health monitoring of an SES: Querying for health metrics from the SES instance or listening to alarms
                    from the resource


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