COSMA - An approach for managing SLAs in composite services

Abstract

Service provisioning is largely built on agreements specifying the mutual responsibilities of service providers and their customers with respect to functional and non-functional parameters. Current SLA management approaches, i.e. WSLA, WS-Agreement, or WSOL, provide extensive SLA language formalizations and management frameworks. However, they focus on bi-lateral service requester/provider constellations neglecting the SLA management requirements of composite service providers, i.e. managing SLAs with atomic service providers and with composite service requesters and aligning both with each other. A SLA management solution for composite services has to consider the contribution of sourced services - formalized in their (atomic) SLAs (ASLA) - in the management of the provided service - formalized in its respective (composite) SLA (CSLA). This paper presents the novel COmposite Sla MAnagement (COSMA) approach for an integrated management of atomic and composite SLAs during their entire lifecycle. It can be utilized for controlling the relationships between ASLAs/CSLAs and thus serves as the basis for managing and optimizing the SLAs involved in composite services. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.