Automation of the SLA life cycle in cloud computing

Abstract

Cloud computing has emerged as a popular paradigm for scalable infrastructure solutions and services. The requirement of automated management of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between the cloud service provider and the cloud user has increased to minimize user interaction with the computing environment. Thus, effective SLA negotiation, monitoring and timely detection of possible SLA violations represent challenging research issues. A big gap exists between a manual/semi-automated and a fully automated SLA life cycle. This gap can be bridged with formalization of generally existing natural language SLAs. Algorithms and strategies for SLA monitoring, management and SLA violation are directly dependent on a complete formalization of SLAs. The goal of the thesis is to analyze currently existing SLA description languages, to find their shortcomings and to develop a complete SLA description language. As next step, we plan to develop distributed algorithms for automated SLA negotiation, monitoring, integration and timely SLA violations detection for cloud computing. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.