An Integrated Approach for Specifying and Enforcing SLAs for Cloud Services

Abstract

Abstract-Cloud computing has evolved from the provisioning of virtual machines to the provisioning of complex services, delivered to customers under the terms of Service-Level Agreements (SLAs). SLAs specify the Quality of Service (QoS) that should be provided to customers as well as the billing model. A main concern for cloud service providers is to maintain the agreed SLA terms in order to avoid losses and penalties. Maintaining the SLA in turn requires translating the QoS to configurations of low-level mechanisms, able to enforce the agreed terms. Current systems provide no integrated support for SLA specification, translation, and enforcement. In this paper, we propose an approach for specifying and enforcing SLAs for cloud service providers. The approach covers the creation of SLA templates under a billing model, the design of performance and faulttolerance QoS assurance mechanisms as well as the translation of QoS to appropriate configurations of those mechanisms. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by using the Qu4DS framework for PaaS cloud providers. Moreover, we evaluate the impact of failures on the provider profit. The experiments were carried out on the Grid5000 testbed and demonstrate the effectiveness of ensuring fault tolerance in different scenarios.

Multi-dimensional Model Driven Policy Generation

“…To overcome this limit and allow a fine-grain tuning of resources, specification at the IaaS layer must integrate both computational and network constraints while adjusting the delivered infrastructure components to the users' requirements and SLAs. Nevertheless, pricing models used to this end do not integrate QoS assurance [7]. Moreover, some low-level scalability rules, such as VMs adjustment [8] must be integrated in a larger QoS management vision as application consolidation processes (used to increase resource utilization) should take into account the performance interference of co-located workloads to fit the application required QoS [9].…”

Quality of service approaches in cloud computing: A systematic mapping study

“…Freitas et al [92] proposed a method to specify and enforce the SLA approach for service providers. The proposed SLA approach includes a cost-saving model in which performance (response time) and reliability are translated to the suitable QoS assurance configurations mechanisms.…”

Cloud resource management driven by profit augmentation

“…Recent work has focused on profit augmentation for providers of high‐level SaaS services, typically built using PaaS or IaaS interfaces (e.g. ). However, no such work combines a complete description of the management algorithms with a thorough evaluation of their impact on provider profit using a real implementation.…”