rSLA: Monitoring SLAs in dynamic service environments

Abstract

Today’s application environments combine Cloud and on-premise infrastructure, as well as platforms and services from different providers to enable quick development and delivery of solutions to their intended users. The ability to use Cloud platforms to stand up applications in a short time frame, the wide availability of Web services, and the application of a continuous deployment model has led to very dynamic application environments. In those application environments, managing quality of service has become more important. The more external service vendors are involved the less control an application owner has and must rely on Service Level Agreements (SLAs). However, SLA management is becoming more difficult. Services from different vendors expose different instrumentation. In addition, the increasing dynamism of application environments entails that the speed of SLA monitoring set up must match the speed of changes to the application environment. This paper proposes the rSLA service and language that is both flexible enough to instrument virtually any environment and agile enough to scale and update SLA management as needed. Using rSLA the time of setting up SLA compliance monitoring of application environments involving infrastructure, platform, and application services can be significantly reduced.