Provisioning resources in a federated infrastructure is also a necessary step for a scenario’s lifecycle.

Our model assumes that resource brokers offer services that later on are matched to resources via contracts under certain availability, cost, policy, etc. Also in FSDL, the end-user requests offered services from resource brokers. Image 1 displays the workflow from describing needed resources (provider agnostic) to selecting concrete resources by specific resource providers.

All this “contract-oriented” information is used by a module called Resource Advisor (see Figure), which transforms the Federation Scenario into a detailed list of requirements for specific resources. As displayed in the Figure, the Resource Advisor proposes to the Federation Scenario developer different Implementation Plans to continue, under certain cost and availability of the resources. In this way we have created a model of an SLA for federation scenarios in order to assign responsibilities to a certain resource for every item contained in an SLA. An SLA aggregates contracts for each requested service. So, a provider’s resource is responsible for a specific requirement of the SLA. This approach of contracts and responsibilities of resources helps also towards monitoring an SLA for different aspects (ie metering, service quality, security, etc). The Resource Advisor module is a plugin in the FSToolkit environment.

The Resource Advisor works only with a Service Request

To access the Resource Advisor either select from the toolbar the button or from the Menu of FSToolkit.