Patent ID: 8880674

Claim:
An apparatus, comprising: a processor; a computer-readable storage medium, coupled to the processor; and logic, stored on the computer-readable storage medium and executed on the processor, for: normalizing a set of infrastructure resource states to create a plurality of normalized infrastructure resource states; normalizing a set of infrastructure resources to create a plurality of normalized infrastructure resources, each normalized infrastructure resource corresponding to one of the normalized infrastructure resource states of the plurality of normalized infrastructure resource states; normalizing a set of operations for acting on the normalized set of infrastructure resources to create a plurality of normalized operations, wherein an input and an output corresponding to each normalized operation of the plurality of normalized operations has a defined type of a plurality of types; composing the normalized operations into an operational sequence such that the output of each normalized operation becomes the input of another normalized operation, wherein a defined type corresponding to each particular input matches a defined type corresponding to the corresponding output; generating a workflow plan as a named composition or normalized operations with well-defined operational semantics corresponding to the normalized infrastructure resource states, normalized infrastructure resources and normalized operations; and executing the workflow plan by evaluating and applying the well-defined semantics to the operational sequence.