Common use of Lifecycle Management Clause in Contracts

Lifecycle Management. Service instances ought to behave like finite state machines, transitioning on key events from (re-)deployment to initialization, activation, and failure. In some states they ought to engage in key activities, e.g. initialization after deployment. In others, they ought to refuse any external engagement and wait patiently for the occurrence of external events, e.g. the delegation of credentials after initialization. Some of these events may be associated with the successful completion of activities, e.g. activation in an insecure infrastructure after initialization. Others depend on external stimuli, such as the bootstrapping of the gHN or indeed its failure. Yet others are associated with the failure of other transitions. Finally, some transitions ought to be monitored and thus published within the infrastructure, e.g. activation or failure. Others are instead to be kept private, e.g. initialization. The framework manages the entire lifetime of gCube services transparently, leaving gCube developers with the sole responsibility of communicating failure whenever they observe it. At the same time, it allows developers to customize service behaviour on each transition in accordance with service-specific semantics.