Towards Composition as a Service - A Quality of Service Driven Approach

Florian Rosenberg, Philipp Leitner, Anton Michlmayr, Predrag Celikovic, Schahram Dustdar

Abstract: Software as a Service (SaaS) and the possibility to compose Web services provisioned over the Internet are important assets for a service-oriented architecture (SOA). However, the complexity and time for developing and provisioning a composite service is very high and it is generally an error-prone task. In this paper we address these issues by describing a semi-automated "Composition as a Service'' (CaaS) approach combined with a domain-specific language called VCL (Vienna composition language). The proposed approach facilitates rapid development and provisioning of composite services by specifying what to compose in a constraint-hierarchy based way using VCL. Invoking the composition service triggers the composition process and upon success the newly composed service is immediately deployed and available. This solution requires no client-side composition infrastructure because it is transparently encapsulated in the CaaS infrastructure.