Towards Application-Specific Service Level Agreements: Experiments in Clouds and Grids

Abstract

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) become increasingly important in clouds, grids and utilities. SLAs that provide bilaterally beneficial terms are likely to attract more consumers and clarify expectations of both consumers and providers. This chapter extends our existing work in SLAs through evaluating application-specific costs within a commercial cloud, a private Eucalyptus cloud and a grid-based system. We assess the total runtime, as well as the wait time due to scheduling or the booting time of a virtual instance. With relatively short processes, this start-up overhead becomes insignificant. In undertaking these experiments, we have provided some justification for a recent hypothesis relating to a preference for job completion time over raw compute performance.