Cloudware Operations and Management - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 390

• Third-party software without cloud licensing
• Workloads requiring auditability and accountability
• Workloads requiring customization
18.6.3 Software Licensing
Software licensing for cloud computing is an enduring problem with-
out a universally accepted solution at this time. The license management
technology is based on the old model of computing centers with licenses
given on the basis of named users or as site licenses. This licensing tech-
nology, developed for a centrally managed environment, cannot accom-
modate the distributed service infrastructure of cloud computing or of
grid computing.
Only very recently, IBM reached an agreement allowing some of its soft-
ware products to be used on EC2. Furthermore, MathWorks developed a
business model for the use of MATLAB in grid environments. The Software-
as-a-Service (SaaS) deployment model is gaining acceptance because it
allows users to pay only for the services they use.
There is significant pressure to change the traditional software licensing
model and find nonhardware-based solutions for cloud computing. The
increased negotiating power of users, coupled with the increase in software
piracy, has renewed interest in alternative schemes such as those proposed
by the SmartLM research project (www.smartlm.eu). SmartLM license man-
agement requires a complex software infrastructure involving SLA, negotia-
tion protocols, authentication, and other management functions.
A commercial product based on the ideas developed by this research
project is elasticLM, which provides license and billing for web-based
services. The architecture of the elasticLM license service has several layers:
co-allocation, authentication, administration, management, business, and
persistency. The authentication layer authenticates communication between
the license service and the billing service as well as the individual applica-
tions; the persistence layer stores the usage records. The main responsibil-
ity of the business layer is to provide the licensing service with the license
prices, and the management coordinates various components of the auto-
mated billing service.
When a user requests a license from the license service, the terms of the
license usage are negotiated and they are part of an SLA document. The
negotiation is based on application-specific templates and the license cost
becomes part of the SLA. The SLA describes all aspects of resource usage,
including the ID of application, duration, number of processors, and guaran-
tees, such as the maximum cost and deadlines. When multiple negotiation
steps are necessary, the WS-Agreement negotiation protocol is used.
To understand the complexity of the issues related to software licensing,
we point out some of the difficulties related to authorization. To verify the