Towards uniform BPEL engine management in the cloud

Abstract

The Web Services Business Process Execution language (BPEL) is a standard for modeling and executing automated processes and is tailor-made for service orchestration. BPEL specifies a serialization format which every BPEL implementation has to understand, thus allowing for the portability of processes among runtime engines. Although the modeling and execution of BPEL processes is portable between engines to a large degree, the lifecycle management of BPEL processes is not standardized and varies a lot for different engines. This paper presents a first approach for a uniform and cloud-based lifecycle management of BPEL processes and engines. We infer a uniform interface for the lifecycle management from the capabilities of current engines and provide a prototypic implementation of a tool that manages processes and engines on a TOSCA-compliant infrastructure.