An ontology-based approach for preventing incompatibility problems of quality requirements during cloud SLA establishment

Abstract

Cloud computing paradigm has emerged as response to challenges of managing and delivering on-demand services, in which provider and customer are willing to sign a Service Level Agreement (SLA). Even though the SLA is used to specify the level of services provided and the guarantee where negotiated conditions are specified, customers are not always satisfied. In order to promote the use of SLA without any ambiguities in quality requirements definitions, it is useful to develop an ontology-based support tool that automate the process of generating SLA regarding the interaction among the ISO 25010 quality characteristics. We propose an approach that uses ontology to semantically classify the quality requirements into the quality characteristics such as described by ISO 25010 and define their relationships. Taking into account customer requirements and considering their interactions before using cloud service is one of the most important and difficult tasks of SLA establishment. Ontology is used to semantically define diverging quality requirements and their relationships. In order to show the applicability of our approach, a tool for SLA generation is implemented and tested.