CLOUD-BASED SOFTWARE ECO-SYSTEM

• US 20110238797A1
• Filed: 03/17/2011
• Published: 09/29/2011
• Est. Priority Date: 03/24/2010
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Accenture Global Services Limited (Accenture PLC)
• Original Assignee: Accenture Global Services Limited (Accenture PLC)
• Inventors: WEE, Sewook
• Granted Patent: US 8,566,428 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 709/220
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 15/177 Initialisation or configuration control processor initialisation G06F9/4405
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/44505 Configuring for program initiating, e.g. using registry, configuration files

Abstract

A novel eco-system is provided which first supplies a standardized template of one or more virtual machine images for software module providers/vendors. A plurality of modules executing on the virtual machine images is selected by a user to comprise a plurality of configurations. A suitable configuration may be determined according to a metric and the determined suitable configuration of software modules is subsequently used to build an end-to-end solution.

Claims

1. A system for selecting a configuration of modules to perform a task, the system comprising:

a plurality of software modules executing in parallel and arranged in a plurality of configurations, each configuration of the plurality of configurations being operable to perform a specified task; and

a plurality of metrics, applied to the plurality of configurations, and operable to determine a plurality of performances achieved by the plurality of configurations in performing the specified task,

wherein, a configuration of software modules is automatically determined from the plurality of configurations of software modules according to the plurality of performances achieved by the plurality of configurations in performing the specified task,

further wherein at least a portion of the plurality of software modules is executed from a cloud computing infrastructure.

2. The system according to claim 1, further comprising a mechanism configured to perform analytic processing to generate a plurality of suggested configurations of software modules to perform the task.

3. The system according to claim 2, wherein the mechanism comprises an analytics engine executing in the cloud computing infrastructure.

4. The system according to claim 2, wherein the mechanism comprises an analytics engine configured to monitor performances of the plurality of software modules according to the plurality of metrics.

5. The system according to claim 4, wherein the performances of the plurality of software modules according to the plurality of metrics are aggregated and stored.

6. The system according to claim 2, wherein an output of the analytic processing performed by the mechanism is used to determine a suggested configuration to be displayed to a user.

7. The system according to claim 1, wherein at least a portion of the plurality of software modules is selected by a user of the system.

8. The system according to claim 1, wherein at least a portion of the plurality of specified metrics applied to the plurality of configurations is selected by a user of the system.

9. A method for deriving a configuration of modules to perform a pre-defined task, the method comprising:

receiving, as input from a user, an application flow comprising a plurality of software modules executed in a plurality of steps;

for each step of the plurality of steps,

receiving a user-selected subset of software modules from the plurality of software modules to execute in parallel,

applying a plurality of performance metrics for the output of user-selected subset of software modules corresponding to the step;

dynamically provisioning hardware resources to execute the user-selected subset of software modules in parallel;

executing the user-selected subset of software modules in parallel in dynamically provisioned hardware resources to perform a pre-defined task;

collecting data corresponding to an output of the subset of software modules;

automatically determining a best performing configuration of software modules for the plurality of steps based on the collected data; and

displaying the best performing configuration of software modules to the user,

wherein the hardware resources are dynamically provisioned from a cloud computing infrastructure.

10. The method according to claim 9 wherein the plurality of performance metrics comprises a plurality of user-selected performance metrics.

11. The method according to claim 9 wherein determining a best performing configuration comprises applying an analytics processing software module.

12. The method according to claim 11 wherein applying an analytics processing module to determine a best performing configuration comprises:

referencing a storage module to derive a performance history corresponding to a plurality of software module configurations for the plurality of performance metrics;

determining a configuration with a favorable performance history; and

presenting the configuration with the favorable performance history as the best performing configuration to a user for consideration.

13. The method according to claim 12, wherein the performance history comprises a frequency of software modules previously selected by the user.

14. The method according to claim 12, wherein the performance history comprises a frequency of software modules previously selected by a community of users executing configurations corresponding to the performance of the pre-defined task in the cloud computing infrastructure.

15. The method according to claim 9 wherein collecting data corresponding to an output comprises generating a representative output at each step of the application flow corresponding to the user-selected subset of software modules for the step.

16. The method according to claim 15, wherein the representative output is generated according to a selection method.

17. The method according to claim 16, wherein the selection method selects an output as the representative output based on a plurality of key criteria, the plurality of key criteria being weighted according to a user-defined weight factor.

18. The method according to claim 15, wherein the representative output is generated according to a voting method.

19. The method according to claim 15, wherein the representative output is generated according to an average method.

20. A method for generating an eco-system for software modules, comprising:

providing access to a standardized template of virtual machine images to software module providers, the standardized template operable for software module providers to deploy software modules to the virtual machine images in the standardized template;

receiving a plurality of deployed software modules from the software module providers;

configuring the plurality of deployed software modules with a plurality of features selected by the software module providers;

collecting the deployed software modules into an eco-system of software modules;

wherein the eco-system is operable to automatically integrate a selection of deployed software modules received from a user into a software configuration to perform a specified task.

21. The method according to claim 20, wherein the software configuration is executed in a cloud computing infrastructure.

22. The method according to claim 20, wherein the software configuration is one of a plurality of software configurations configured to perform the specified task, and further wherein the eco-system is further operable to execute the plurality of configurations in parallel.

23. The method according to claim 22, wherein the eco-system is further operable to apply a plurality of performance metrics to the plurality of software configurations.

24. The method according to claim 23, wherein the eco-system is further operable to determine a best performing software configuration from the plurality of software configurations based on applying the plurality of performance metrics.

25. The method according to claim 20, wherein the plurality of features comprises a plurality of security features.

26. The method according to claim 25, wherein the plurality of security features is comprised from a list including either:

firewall settings, or key management settings, or user account management settings, or any combination thereof.

27. The method according to claim 20, wherein the plurality of features comprises a plurality of usage monitoring features.

28. The method according to claim 27, wherein the plurality of usage monitoring features is comprised from a list including either:

user account activity logging, or billing, or accounting, or auditing, or any combination thereof.