End-to-end service quality for cloud applications

Abstract

This paper aims to highlight the importance of End-to-End (E2E) service quality for cloud scenarios, with focus on telecom carrier-grade services. In multi-tenant distributed and virtualized cloud infrastructures, enhanced resource sharing raises issues in terms of performance stability and reliability. Moreover, the heterogeneity of business entities responsible for the cloud service delivery, threatens the possibility of offering precise E2E service levels. Setting up proper Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) among the involved players, may become overly challenging. However, problems may be mitigated by a thoughtful intervention of standardization. The paper reviews some of the most important efforts in research and industry to tackle E2E service quality and concludes with some recommendations for additional research and/or standardization effort required to be able to deploy mission critical or interactive real-time services with high demands on service quality, reliability and predictability on cloud platforms. © 2013 Springer International Publishing.