Patent ID: 8856382

Claim:
A system, comprising: a given cloud services environment comprising one or more clouds; and a cloud services framework configured to: register one or more service offerings from a plurality of independent software vendors for delivery of one or more service instances via said one or more clouds of the given cloud services environment, each of the one or more service offerings being described by at least one service descriptor; manage lifecycles of one or more service instances instantiated on said one or more clouds of the given cloud services environment, each of the one or more service instances being obtained from at least one of the one or more registered service offerings; provide one or more service support utilities for the one or more service instances instantiated on said one or more clouds of the given cloud services environment, each of the one or more service support utilities being customized by at least one service descriptor; and unregister one or more service offerings accessible via said one or more clouds of the given cloud services environment; wherein a service comprises at least one component and a service descriptor comprises one or more models.