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title: Cloud Service “Bilities”
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published: 2025-03-01
created: 2025-03-01
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# Cloud Service “Bilities”

**The "bilities"**

In heritage OpenText Architecture we are constantly chasing how to meet what we lovingly call the "bilities".  Here is a list of the "bilities"

Below are the primary capability requirements of any application to be operated by OT Commercial Cloud Service Delivery.  Some are absolute requirements, others add to the stability, performance and customer experience of the service.

These define the “What” not the “How” of either the application or the infrastructure.

**Recoverability** – Capability of an application to recover to a normal processing disposition as soon as a deviation from normal processing is detected either internal to the application or through external monitoring.  Recoverability includes not only restarting but restarting processing where it was last interrupted.

**Usability** – All applications in a processing community are interacted with in a common and predictable manner, both from the administration side and the consumer side.  Standards in usability across applications supports efficient usage across those applications.

**Operability** – Capability of an application component to be started, stopped, updated, diagnosed and deployed in a standard and predictable way.

**Maintainability** – Capability of an application component to be updated, patched or functions changed in a standard and predictable manner.  Maintainability requires backward compatibility through 2 or more releases to enable maintenance activities to occur online.

**Securability** – Capability of an application component to protect its assets and customer payload from unauthorized access.    Additionally, a capability to enforce access control rules based upon approved role.

**Persistability** – Capability of an application to always persist payload data once it has entered the OT processing environment.  That data must exist and be accessible through maintenance, defect, application outage and normal processing.  Persistence should last the entirety of the payloads expected processing lifecycle from entrance to the environment through historical archive expiration. Persistence will accommodate global processing and Disaster Recovery requirements where applicable.

**Mobility** – Capability of an application to survive infrastructure actions to support moving service components through In-center High Availability, Intra-center Geographic relocation and Intra-service Private to Public Cloud relocation.

**Throttleability** – Capability of an application to control the processing rate through each component or service.  This key capability of each application component enables the operators of the service to isolate and maintain control of recovery to normal processing flow.

**Deployability** – Capability of an application component to be maintained without downtime to the solution as a whole.  Maintenance, wherever possible, needs to take place without externally identifiable service interruption.

**Reliability** – Capability of an application component or collection of components to with a high degree of consistency perform its defined function through both normal and abnormal operating conditions.  Reliability requires that the application component be able to perform its defined work through outage.

**Reusability** – Capability of application service to perform for more than one service consumer.  Build once, use many in a common and consistent way.

**Accountability/Billability** – Capability of an application to accurately report its usage by customer tenant for financial accounting purposes.

**Durability**–Capability of an application to survive deviation from normal operating conditions.

**Troubleshootability** – Capability to provide clear output to logging systems about all application components health and disposition during both normal and abnormal operating conditions.

**Defensibility** – Capability and awareness of the application to defend itself against incorrect usage.  Both accidental and purposeful.

**Extensibility** – An upfront design capability that takes into consideration the applications ability to expand its functions automatically in response to dynamic demand prompts.  Extensibility promotes expandability and elasticity.

**Auditability** – An application needs to be deployed with capabilities and structures, and within an infrastructure design, that meet applicable external security and audit standards.

**Application configurability** – All required feature and functional configuration management should be provided through a Web/API enabled interface.  No customer should need administrative access to underlying systems or infrastructure to perform customer available administrative tasks.

**Observability** – Capability of an application to be deployed as an active part of an ecosystem that provides and accurate, timely, and complete indication of functional status and capacity level.

**Visibility** – Provide capability to see detailed monitoring data describing the operating condition or health of the application.

**Affordability** – An application needs to implement and use components and software that achieve P&L objectives and retain that position when scaled.  This includes the full range of administrative, support, and operational costs.

**Adaptability** – An advanced capability of an application to be aware of processing going on around both upstream and downstream.  AI and machine learning are key to this capability.

