VOM Common Capabilities

An analysis of virtual organisation management problems has revealed some common capabilities which are potentially useful to businesses starting to use the Grid and that need to deal with virtual organisations.

Creation of Instances on Distributed Hosting Environments
To identify and create the grid infrastructure services for running and managing application on a shared distributed set of resources or endpoints. Concrete resources or endpoints belong to different Hosting Environments of different SP/ASP.
The common capability addresses a common issue in SOA and Grid environments and it can be used when there is the need to put together heterogeneous and distributed resources coming from different providers. These resources need to be seen as a virtual common resource and be managed as such.

Application Virtualisation (or Exposure) & Management
Integration and exposition of application capabilities, provided by different SP/ASP, through a single access point (e.g. a VHE or VO Gateway).
This common capability allows an easy management of the application, taking into account policies and contracts, without the overhead of managing the enabling infrastructure.

Secure Federation
Ability to establish and maintain trust across business domains by means of provable security, so that secure federation lifecycle (creation, evolution, and termination) can be managed and controlled by the parties involved.
This common capability is required when B2B trust relationships have to be established between participants in a collaboration and it is common if a Trusted Third Party is responsible for the authentication of all parties in a VO.

Automatic Resource Discovery
It refers to the process of locating a machine-processable description of a Web service-related resource that may have been previously unknown and that meets certain functional criteria. It involves matching a set of functional and other criteria with a set of resource descriptions.
This common capability addresses the common issue of discovery of resources located internally or/and externally a VO. The selection of VO resources must satisfy as well as possible the application workload as well as other criteria

VO Set-up
It addresses the basic steps that are executed to set up a VO (after the memberships, roles, agreements and contracts have been negotiated and the VO policies have been defined)
This common capability can be used if there is no interest in the complexity and dynamicity of the whole VO creation process (e.g. there can be cases in which members, contracts, agreements are a priori agreed and do not need to be negotiated) but functionalities are needed to configure the basic information regarding membership, policies and the infrastructural environment of the VO.

: An overview of the relationships among the common capabilities