Dynamic SLAs for clouds

Abstract

In the Cloud domain, to guarantee adaptation to the needs of users and providers, Service-Level-Agreements (SLAs) would benefit from mechanisms to capture the dynamism of services. The existing SLA languages attempt to address this challenge by focusing on renegotiation of the agreement terms, which is a heavy-weight process, not really suitable for dealing with cloud dynamism. In this paper, we propose an extension of SLAC, a SLA language for clouds that we have recently defined, with a mechanism that enable dynamic modifications of the service agreement. We formally describe this extension, implement it in the SLAC framework and analyse the impacts of dynamic SLAs in some applications. The advantages of dynamic SLAs are demonstrated by comparing their effect with that of static SLA and of the “renegotiation” approach.