Model for Service License in API Ecosystems

Rapid growth and consumption of REST APIs is generating new types of service marketplaces, which are dynamic and complex networks of providers and consumers. Existing models for software licenses and service standards, such as WDSL fall short of providing flexible frameworks for capturing the requirements that this newly created environment demands. Gaps exist in support for multi-pricing agreements across multiple providers and consumers, support for both usage and capacity events and automated generation and composition of licenses. Developers are accustomed to self-serve model, where they create and deploy new applications on the Cloud with a few mouse clicks, employing one or more available APIs. As a result, there is a need to be able to automatically assess existing licenses, compose new ones and understand their dependencies in order to shorten the time-to-value for new services. In this paper, we propose a model-driven approach for defining API service licenses, which provides capabilities to capture business and legal constraints, enable license metric calculation, QoS calculation and service pricing rules. We present API SLA analyzer system, which utilizes proposed license model to uncover SLA violations in real-time.