A Framework for Negotiating Service Level Agreement of Cloud-based Services

Abstract

Abstract Cloud-based services have become the backbone of IT industry nowadays and the promising technology that offers a commoditized service to the software, the platform and the infrastructure where they are delivered as a service. Because several providers have started to offer a vast diversity of Cloud services, Cloud customers became unable to decide whose services they should use and what is the basis for their selection. Therefore, a legal contract is necessarily needed for negotiating these both Cloud parties. This contract is referred to Service Level Agreement (SLA). A SLA negotiation between Cloud parties assists in defining the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of critical service-based processes. In addition, the role of third party in the negotiation process that is represented in Cloud broker will recommend customers to achieve the required service efficiently when negotiating with multiple providers. Currently, there is no framework that can allow customers to evaluate Cloud offerings and rank them based on their interests. Thus it is important to have a methodology that might map the customers’ requirements referred as Service Level Objectives (SLO) with the most reliable Cloud service. In this work, we address this problem by presenting a proposed framework that intends to empower customers to evaluate and select between the different Cloud service offerings. This proposed framework aims to formalize the SLA with precise and unambiguous definition of services key performance indicators (KPIs) to support automated negotiation on the details of the agreement for both contracted parties. Our reasoning evaluation of proposed framework proved the importance of negotiation process for both Cloud parties in mapping the Cloud services with the customers’ requirements.