Policy Technologies for Self-Managing Systems

Chapter 2 Policy Lifecycle—Creation, Distribution, and Enforcement

The lifecycle of a policy goes through multiple stages. First a policy must be created via a human administrator using a policy-authoring tool and specified in a concrete policy language. It can be then translated into different forms of policy rules to bridge the gap between the representation that is more familiar to the administrator and the format that is easier to process at low-level systems. Policies should be stored for persistence and later retrieval. It can also be distributed for execution to various parts of the IT system that may be geographically dispersed. In some cases, more than one policy rule may be merged to create a new policy. Over time, policies may be ...