SLA life cycle automation and management for cloud services

Abstract

Cloud service providers mostly offer service level agreements (SLAs) in descriptive format which is not directly consumable by a machine or a system. Manual management of SLAs with growing usage of cloud services can be a challenging, erroneous and tedious task especially for the cloud service users (CSUs) acquiring multiple cloud services. The necessity of automating the complete SLA life cycle (which includes SLA description in machine readable format, negotiation, monitoring and management) becomes imminent due to complex requirements for the precise measurement of quality of service (QoS) parameters. In this work, the complete SLA life cycle management is presented using an extended SLA specification to support multiple CSU locations. A time efficient SLA negotiation technique is integrated with the extended SLA specification for concurrently negotiating with multiple cloud service providers (CSPs). After a successful negotiation process, the next major task in the SLA life cycle is to monitor the cloud services for ensuring the quality of service according to the agreed SLA. A distributed monitoring approach for the cloud SLAs is elaborated, in this work, which is suitable for services being used at single or multiple locations. The discussed monitoring approach reduces the number of communications of SLA violations to a monitoring coordinator by eliminating the unnecessary communications. The presented work on the complete SLA life cycle automation is evaluated and validated with the help of experiments and simulations.