Efficient network service level agreement monitoring for cloud computing systems

Abstract

Cloud computing defines an infrastructure to provide virtual network services on demand. One of the challenges to cloud computing systems is how to manage service level agreements (SLA) while guaranteeing the service level objectives (SLOs) negotiated between provider and customer. Deviations in the expected behavior of network service levels may be generically named traffic anomalies. The awareness of anomalies in cloud services may provide useful information for both customer and provider, in order to support management accounting to their business strategies. In this paper we present a novel approach to monitor and account network SLA deviations by designing a new architecture, as well as implementing and deploying it as an open source engine. It has been integrated into a production middleware to federate clouds, the Jit Clouds. Nevertheless, this monitoring mechanism is loosely coupled, being extensible to any sort of clouds. The architecture proposed was validated on a federated cloud platform in production.