The emerging computing paradigm Cloud has brought in a plethora of new opportunities to overcome organizational challenges in businesses. As a matter of fact, Cloud is a genuine alternative to expensive data center infrastructure. Some issues related to security and privacy of data have been raised time and again. In order to overcome these issues, Distributed OSGi or DOSGi architecture can be deployed to share electronic records within cloud systems. With the help of such a system, client programs can be dynamically discovered and interactively used to access services.

What is a DOSGi Cloud?

For the records, DOSGi stands for Distributed Open Services Gateway initiative. It is a service-oriented framework which is delivered by Cloud service providers to render Cloud-based sensing services. Enterprise software and mobile computing devices use Java runtime-based applications. Various types of machines are maintained in such systems namely:

- Web server clusters   

- Distributed database   

- Virtual machines   

- Hosting machines

A DOSGi Cloud computing infrastructure can manage all such resources very efficiently. With the help of a preinstalled Client agent on the host machines, the machine status can be monitored in the virtual environment. The growing demand for data in the cloud environment calls for the expansion of cloud domain. As a result, client agents need to be updated or reinstalled. In a lean Java-based component system, OSGi is an industry standard. It generally focuses on service-oriented architectures. Any business can build and deploy a cloud ecosystem by making use of OSGi. This can be added with extra controls to create a remote service invocation within a cloud ecosystem.

How can you develop a distributed OSGi Cloud? The provisioning basically focuses on OSGi frameworks for they are dynamic. They can be assigned and repurposed dynamically. So you are saved from sending out a bulky cloud VM image once again over the same network. The image obtained in the beginning can be easily reused for it can change its role/function over some period of time. 

Pre-configured VM images represent other deployments within an ecosystem. One can start with some identical images as well as deploy other special images which will behave as provisioners. The OSGi framework allows repurposing and assignment as and when required. A basic OSGi setup has been depicted in the image:
 

Not a single OSGi bundle is statically configured. Together they constitute a dynamic OSGi Cloud Ecosystem that binds services through a remote services compliant Discovery mechanism. Simplistic demo provisioners monitor the frameworks and provision the same with OSGi bundles. In case one goes down, another one can be redeployed to ensure service alternatives.

In this diagram, the entire DOSGi ecosystem comprises of 5 OSGi frameworks. 4 of them are identical which are:

- osgi1

- osgi2

- osgi3

- web

The fifth one has a well-known hostname. This has a reason: this OSGi hosts the web component which needs to be accessed from the outer world. In real world scenario where data is aggressively shared, this baseline is not much different from the first 4. It also behaves like a provisioner/management agent, so this one has some extra bundles deployed that can provision OSGi bundles in the other frameworks in the ecosystem.

To be able to work with such a dynamic ecosystem of OSGi frameworks, the provisioner needs to monitor the frameworks available in it. Since these frameworks are represented as OSGi services, the monitoring task can be done through OSGi service mechanics with the help of a tracking tool. It should use the same declarative services or some other OSGi service-based framework for best results. Once you begin using an OSGi repository service to deliver content, highly declarative model can be rendered to the provisioner through a generic management agent.