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.

Cloud Economics: Principles, Costs, and Benefits

Abstract: Cloud computing is an important next step in the trend toward inexpensive and universal access to information and sophisticated computing resources that help close the digital divide between the computer haves and have-nots. In cloud computing, the end-users can access fully functional software and services online at little or no cost using inexpensive computers or mobile communication devices that connect them via the Internet. Innovative service providers no longer need to own and maintain development or production infrastructures and can automatically scale their production operations to meet growing demand much more easily and economically than possible with internal data centers, traditional hosting, or managed services arrangements. The cloud’s inherent ability to dynamically scale up or scale down the infrastructure commitment as demand changes on a pay-as-you-go basis has a positive impact on the service provider’s overhead costs, energy costs, and in reducing its carbon footprint.

Service mediation and negotiation bootstrapping as first achievements towards self-adaptable grid and cloud services

Abstract: Nowadays, novel computing paradigms as for example Grid or Cloud Computing are gaining more and more on importance. In case of Cloud Computing users pay for the usage of the computing power provided as a service. Beforehand they can negotiate specific functional and non-functional requirements relevant for the application execution. However, providing computing power as a service bears different research challenges. On the one hand dynamic, versatile, and adaptable services are required, which can cope with system failures and environmental changes. On the other hand, human interaction with the system should be minimized. In this paper we present the first results in establishing adaptable, versatile, and dynamic services considering negotiation bootstrapping and service mediation achieved in context of the Foundations of Self-Governing ICT Infrastructures (FoSII) project. We discuss novel meta-negotiation and SLA mapping solutions for Grid/Cloud services bridging the gap between current QoS models and Grid/Cloud middleware and representing important prerequisites for the establishment of autonomic Grid/Cloud services. We present document models for the specification of meta-negotiations and SLA mappings. Thereafter, we discuss the sample architecture for the management of meta-negotiations and SLA mappings.

Verification of service level agreement contracts in a client server environment

Abstract: A method, apparatus and computer program product are disclosed to enable independent verification of service level agreement between two parties. In one embodiment, a first party contracts the hosting service of a second party to provide said first party with Web page and services on second party's equipment. Said contract contains a Service Level Agreement specifying performance parameters and guarantees for the response time experienced by users of said Web page and services. Independent verification by a third party of said agreement is done for a fee through several steps. In a first step, said third party inserts measuring and reporting instructions into blocks of information maintained on the server of said second party. The measuring instructions are for delivery to the client with the blocks of information. The delivery of the instructions occurs responsive to a request for the information by the client. Once they are delivered, the instructions are executed by the client. This client-side execution produces a measure of service that is provided to the client by the network and the server. In another step, reporting instructions are inserted into the blocks of information. Like the measuring instructions, the reporting instructions are also for delivery to the client. The reporting instructions may be in just one of the blocks of information, and their delivery also occurs responsive to a request for the information by the client. As a result of being executed by the client, the reporting instructions cause the client to send a report of the measure to a verifying agent.

Sla based service brokering in intercloud environments

Abstract: The fast emerging Cloud computing market over the last years resulted in a variety of heterogeneous and less interoperable Cloud infrastructures. This leads to a challenging and urgent problem for Cloud users when selecting their best fitting Cloud provider and hence it ties them to a particular provider. A new growing research paradigm, which envisions a network of interconnected and interoperable Clouds through the use of open standards, is Intercloud computing. This allows users to easily migrate their application workloads across Clouds regardless of the underlying used Cloud provider platform. A very promising future use case of Intercloud computing is Cloud services brokerage. In this paper, we propose a generic architecture for a Cloud service broker operating in an Intercloud environment by using the latest Cloud standards. The broker aims to find the most suitable Cloud provider while satisfying the users’ service requirements in terms of functional and non-functional Service Level Agreement parameters. After discussing the broker value-added services, we present in detail the broker design. We focus especially on how the expected SLA management and resource interoperability functionalities are included in the broker. Finally, we present a realistic simulation testbed to validate and evaluate the proposed architecture.

Automated SLA negotiation framework for cloud computing

Abstract: A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a legal contract between parties to ensure the Quality of Service (QoS) are provided the providers to the customers. A SLA negotiation between participants assists in defining the QoS requirements of critical service-based processes. However, the negotiation process for customers is a significant task particularly when there are multiple SaaS providers in the Cloud market, as service cost and quality are constantly changing and consumers have varying needs. Therefore, we propose a novel automated negotiation framework where a SaaS broker is utilized as the one-stop-shop for customers to achieve the required service efficiently when negotiating with multiple providers. The automated negotiation framework facilitates intelligent bilateral bargaining of SLAs between a SaaS broker and multiple providers to achieve different objectives for different participants. To maximize profit and improve customer satisfaction levels for the broker, we propose the design of counter offer generation strategies and decision making heuristics that take into account time, market constraints and trade-off between QoS parameters. Our negotiation heuristics are evaluated by extensive experimental studies of our framework using data from a real Cloud provider.