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Enterprises often have no integrated and comprehensive view of their enterprise topology describing their entire IT infrastructure, software, on-premise and offpremise services, processes, and their interrelations. Especially due to acquisitions, mergers, reorganizations, and outsourcing there is no clear 'big picture' of the enterprise topology. Through this lack, management of applications becomes harder and duplication of components and information systems increases. Furthermore, the lack of insight makes changes in the enterprise topology like consolidation, migration, or outsourcing more complex and error prone which leads to high operational cost. In this paper we propose Enterprise Topology Graphs (ETG) as formal model to describe an enterprise topology. Based on established graph theory ETG bring formalization and provability to the cloud. They enable the application of proven graph algorithms to solve enterprise topology research problems in general and cloud research problems in particular. For example, we present a search algorithm which locates segments in large and possibly distributed enterprise topologies using structural queries. To illustrate the power of the ETG approach we show how it can be applied for IT consolidation to reduce operational costs, increase flexibility by simplifying changes in the enterprise topology, and improve the environmental impact of the enterprise IT.

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Cloud-based applications require a high degree of automation regarding their IT resource management, for example, to handle scalability or resource failures. This automation is enabled by cloud providers offering management interfaces accessed by applications without human interaction. The properties of clouds, especially pay-per-use billing and low availability of individual resources, demand such a timely system management. We call the automated steps to perform one of these management tasks a “management flow”. Because the emerging behavior of the overall system is comprised of many such management flows and is often hard to predict, we propose defining abstract management flows, describing common steps handling the management tasks. These abstract management flows may then be refined for each individual use case. We cover abstract management flows describing how to make an application elastic, resilient regarding IT resource failure, and how to move application components between different runtime environments. The requirements of these management flows for handled applications are expressed using architectural patterns that have to be implemented by the applications. These dependencies result in abstract management flows being interrelated with architectural patterns in a uniform pattern catalog. We propose a method by use of a catalog to guide application managers during the refinement of abstract management flows at the design stage of an application. Following this method, runtime-specific management functionality and management interfaces are used to obtain automated management flows for a developed application