Virtual Agent Provenance in Cloud VMs
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Solution Overview
Problem
The dynamic nature of cloud infrastructures, particularly the virtual layer, obfuscates the origin of artifacts and events due to dynamic provisioning and decommissioning of virtual resources, making it difficult to preserve provenance in cloud computing environments.
Innovation Solution
Pairing virtual machine instances with virtual agents registered in a persistent registry, where the agents monitor transactions and generate events with provenance information, including a unique signature, to create composite end-to-end logs of business processes.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If virtual machine instances are dynamically provisioned and decommissioned in cloud infrastructure, then cloud computing benefits such as dynamic scalability are enabled, but provenance information of virtual machines is obfuscated and difficult to preserve
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces virtual agents as intermediary components that are paired with virtual machine instances. These agents remain registered with a persistent registry even when the virtual machines are dynamically provisioned or decommissioned, thereby preserving provenance information through the intermediary layer that bridges the dynamic VM layer and the static registry layer
Solution Approach 2:
The patent implements preliminary action by pre-registering virtual agents with a persistent registry before the virtual machine instances are actually provisioned. This ensures that when VMs are dynamically created and decommissioned, their provenance information is already captured and stored in the registry, allowing traceability without requiring re-architecture of the virtual machines
Data Source
AI summary
A method comprises pairing a virtual machine instance with a virtual agent that is registered with registry in an execution environment. In this regard, upon instantiating the virtual machine and the corresponding virtual agent, the virtual agent monitors for transaction(s), e.g., a specific invoked method, on that execution environment. The virtual agent is also configured for generating an event in response to detecting the transaction. The virtual agent provides a unique signature associated with the event, which identifies the origin of the virtual machine instance. Still further, the virtual agent is configured for forwarding the event to the registry for collating with other events so as to produce composite end-to-end logs of processes in a manner that enables provenance.