Service-level agreement

About: Service-level agreement is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4358 publications have been published within this topic receiving 75333 citations. The topic is also known as: SLA.

Dynamic Resource Allocation and Scheduling for Cloud-Based Virtual Content Delivery Networks

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel framework for virtual content delivery networks (CDNs) based on cloud computing. The proposed framework aims to provide multimedia content delivery services customized for content providers by sharing virtual machines (VMs) in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud, while fulfilling the service level agreement. Furthermore, it supports elastic virtual CDN services, which enables the capabilities of VMs to be scaled to encompass the dynamically changing resource demand of the aggregated virtual CDN services. For this, we provide the system architecture and relevant operations for the virtual CDNs and evaluate the performance based on a simulation.

Systematic Analysis of Public Cloud Service Level Agreements and Related Business Values

Abstract: Cloud computing offers lots of attractive benefits to individuals and organizations. However, the adoption rate is a far cry from what it really deserves. Lack of well defined Service Level Agreement (SLA) is one of the key factors. This research aims to provide better understanding of the status quo of the current public cloud service level agreements and to recommend best practices. We conducted a content analysis on around thirty SLAs to identify commonly stated attributes and commonly missing attributes. A follow up case study interviewed a selection of cloud customers further investigates the importance of SLA attributes and its relationship with potential business. The result reveals that some of the commonly missed attributes such as customer support, data protection plan are considered as very important attributes and most SLA attributes are directly related with business values.

A vision for personalized service level agreements in the cloud

Abstract: Public Clouds today provide a variety of services for data analysis such as Amazon Elastic MapReduce and Google BigQuery. Each service comes with a pricing model and service level agreement (SLA). Today's pricing models and SLAs are described at the level of compute resources (instance-hours or gigabytes processed). They are also different from one service to the next. Both conditions make it difficult for users to select a service, pick a configuration, and predict the actual analysis cost. To address this challenge, we propose a new abstraction, called a Personalized Service Level Agreement, where users are presented with what they can do with their data in terms of query capabilities, guaranteed query performance and fixed hourly prices.

Legal Issues in Grid and Cloud Computing

Abstract: A business scenario based on the adoption and implementation of Grid and Cloud technology presents many legal issues that have to be taken into account by companies and individuals that plan to start a Grid/Cloud-based business. In general terms, Grid/Cloud technology is not ‘neutral’, in the sense that it brings several particularities as regards, contractual and security profiles (Parrilli et al. 2008). In other words, a contract between a Grid/Cloud provider and a customer is likely to be slightly different from an agreement between a provider of a different technology (not based on dispersed resources) and a client. The legal issues that affect a Grid/Cloud-based business are many, and include, just to mention a few, contract law, intellectual property rights, privacy law, taxation, etc. The aim of this chapter is that of providing the reader with some clarifications and guidelines as regards the most relevant legal issues that a typical customer should take into consideration when reviewing the terms for the provision of Grid/Cloud services from a technology provider. Two moments will be specifically analysed: (i) the contract, or contracts, signed by the customer and the Grid/Cloud provider, i.e. formation, validity and enforceability of the agreement(s); (ii) the contractual relationship following the signing of the agreement, in connection with the liabilities of and the remedies at the disposal of the parties. Special attention will be dedicated to security (and privacy) profiles, which are supposed to be the Achilles’ heel in Grid and Cloud computing. A few comments will also be dedicated to the most relevant taxation issue. In other words, we guide a typical customer in the process of entering into an agreement with a technology provider and therefore we will follow the negotiations phase (if any) and the signing of the contract. Furthermore, we will identify the risks underlying the contract and explain how these risks can be reduced or avoided. When the agreement is ready for signature, our mission will end.

Dynamic Workload Migration Over Backbone Network to Minimize Data Center Electricity Cost

Abstract: As more organizations adopt cloud services, energy consumption in data centers (DCs) keeps increasing. Today, information and communication technology (ICT) has become a major consumer of energy worldwide. A large portion of ICT energy consumption is used to power servers running in DCs and the network they use to communicate. In this paper, we consider that energy cost at a particular DC is often related to the electricity price regulated by independent system operators/regional transmission organizations. As these prices vary in time and depend on the geographical locations of the DCs, recent studies have shown that the spatio-temporal variations of electricity price can be exploited to reduce electricity cost. In particular, as workloads tend to change, often unpredictably, adaptive workload placement and migration can help to serve the workloads in regions with lower electricity costs. While most prior works consider a quasi-static scenario with known workload patterns, this paper proposes dynamic workload-aware algorithms which exploit the spatio-temporal variations of electricity costs to minimize the energy cost in ICT. Although prior studies focused on power consumption from power consumers such as servers, cooling systems, etc., recent studies have shown that the network elements consume a significant portion of the energy. Hence, while reducing DC energy cost, this paper also considers electricity cost of the backbone network. Algorithms introduced in this paper use dynamic request re-routing and live virtual machine (VM) migration to move workloads to DCs with lower electricity cost. We consider VM migration cost (including electricity cost at backbone network nodes), bandwidth constraints for migration, VM consolidation, constraints from service level agreement, and administrative overhead of VM migration. Our simulation studies show that the proposed algorithms reduce operational cost of DCs significantly.