Towards Automated SLA Management for Service Delivery in SOA-based Environments

Abstract

The services landscape is changing with the growing adoption by businesses of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), the migration of business solutions to the cloud, and the proliferation of smartphones and Internet-enabled handheld devices to consume services. To meet their business goals, organizations increasingly demand services, which can satisfy their functional and non-functional requirements. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are seen as the means to guarantee the continuity in service provisioning and required levels of service. In this paper, we propose a framework for service provisioning, which aims at providing support for automated SLA negotiation and management. The Service Broker component carries out SLA negotiation with selected service-providers on behalf of service-consumers. Multi-rounds of negotiations are very often required to reach an agreement. In each round, the negotiating parties bargain on multiple SLA parameters by trying to maximize their global utility functions. The monitoring infrastructure is in charge of observing SLA compliance monitoring using measurements obtained from independent third party monitoring services.