Service Level Agreements Management Research Articles

Augmenting Monte Carlo Tree Search for managing service level agreements

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is an algorithmic technique utilized in reinforcement learning, a subfield of artificial intelligence, that combines tree-based search and random sampling for decision-making in uncertain environments. Although MCTS has been successfully used for playing complex games such as Chess and Go, without customizing the original algorithm using domain knowledge, it struggles to effectively solve complex supply chain problems. This study proposes several augmenting mechanisms for MCTS, tailored for managing service level agreements. Furthermore, we enhance the proposed solution for products/services where adjusting the base-stock level is feasible. The results demonstrate that even with non-stationary demand, where most optimization methods reach their limits, employing these augmentation mechanisms significantly improves MCTS performance.

Strategies for efficient resource management in federated cloud environments supporting Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

The increased market activity and visibility have resulted in a growing demand for additional computer resources to meet the needs of cloud clients. Delivering promised quality of service (QoS) while fulfilling diverse resource demands dynamically might be difficult for a single Cloud Service Provider (CSP). Federated cloud computing, also known as distributed cloud computing, is an established paradigm in which CSPs collaborate to aggregate unused resources, resulting in financial and QoS benefits. Notably, this strategy improves availability and reliability while overcoming individual CSP difficulties in preserving QoS amid fluctuations in resource demand. The federated cloud successfully leverages computing resources even during low-demand periods, demanding a comprehensive resource management strategy for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) inside participating CSPs. Such a strategy is crucial for preserving QoS, ensuring availability and dependability, and optimizing underutilized computing resources. This research presents the novel IaaS cloud design, revealing a unique methodology that reimagines traditional cloud systems. The proposed IaaS cloud framework investigates virtual machine migration and resource consolidation, building a strong foundation founded on IaaS principles and emphasizing the crucial role of virtualization. The technique introduces ground-breaking concepts such as Cloud User (CU) and Reputation Management, which are strengthened by specific algorithms that improve cloud service security and trust. Furthermore, the combination of Trust Manager (TM) and Broker Manager (BM) components strengthens SLA control and trust evaluation, aligning smoothly with IaaS standards to improve service quality and reliability. User Profiling, which is classified into private, social, and corporate profiles, provides a separate lens for successful cloud user management inside the IaaS landscape, allowing for customised service delivery. SMI and cutting-edge ranking algorithms, such as the Deep Q-based Algorithm, optimize cloud service provider selection and ranking—an important aspect of IaaS. The use of the Banker's algorithm and a comprehensive Service Level Agreement (SLA) Management plan provides efficient resource allocation, mirroring recognized IaaS standards. This research study not only throws light on these trailblazing techniques, but it also establishes a new standard for IaaS cloud design and resource management.

Blockchain‐based SLA management for 6G networks

AbstractIn this letter, we propose the use of a blockchain‐based solution for inter‐provider agreements in 6G networks, utilizing smart contracts and Chainlink for monitoring and assessing Service Level Agreements (SLAs), including penalty calculations. We evaluate the proposed solution by deploying it on two public blockchains, Ethereum and Polygon, and find that Polygon provides a cost‐effective option for creating inter‐provider agreements. This is particularly important for use cases involving numerous transactions. Additionally, Chainlink enables secure and transparent access to off‐chain SLA data, and we observe lower transaction latency in Polygon. This suggests that utilizing blockchain‐based solutions such as smart contracts can aid the process of creating inter‐provider agreements for leasing and selling resources in 6G networks, with Chainlink oracle providing support for their SLA management. However, factors such as transaction cost and latency need to be considered.

Proof-of-Monitoring (PoM): A Novel Consensus Mechanism for Blockchain-Based Secure Service Level Agreement Management

In the current 5th Generation (5G) networking paradigm, the enforcement of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) is a non-trivial measure to ensure the scope and the quality of services and standards between tenants and service providers (SPs). On top of this, Secure Service Level Agreements (SSLA) are introduced to ensure that SPs deliver the most critical and required security-related standards defined in the contract, such as integrity, confidentiality, availability, non-repudiation, and privacy assurance. However, with the tendency for more distributed and multi-stakeholder networking architectures in next-generation networks, the management process of such SSLAs will be challenging due to the diversified security vulnerabilities and complexity of underlying technologies. Although blockchain is emerging as a platform to facilitate such distributed SSLA/SLA management frameworks, its currently available consensus mechanisms are more generic. Still, they need to improve in terms of applying in multi-stakeholder networks. Therefore, this paper presents a novel consensus mechanism called Proof-of-Monitoring (PoM) for a blockchain-based novel SSLA management framework. Moreover, we provide details about the prototype implementation of our proposed consensus algorithm and SSLA management framework. It is proven by comparing our proposal with the other existing solutions that our solution outperforms in many aspects, such as energy consumption, computation cost, and security features.

SLA Management in Intent-Driven Service Management Systems: A Taxonomy and Future Directions

Traditional, slow and error-prone human-driven methods to configure and manage Internet service requests are proving unsatisfactory. This is due to an increase in Internet applications with stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements. Which demands faster and fault-free service deployment with minimal or without human intervention. With this aim, intent-driven service management (IDSM) has emerged, where users express their service level agreement (SLA) requirements in a declarative manner as intents . With the help of closed control-loop operations, IDSM performs service configurations and deployments, autonomously to fulfill the intents. This results in a faster deployment of services and reduction in configuration errors caused by manual operations, which in turn reduces the SLA violations. This article is an attempt to provide a systematic review of How the IDSM systems manage and fulfill the SLA requirements specified as intents. As an outcome, the review identifies four intent management activities, which are performed in a closed-loop manner. For each activity, a taxonomy is proposed and used to compare the existing techniques for SLA management in IDSM systems. A critical analysis of all the considered research articles in the review and future research directions are presented in the conclusion.

A blockchain-based SLA monitoring and compliance assessment for IoT ecosystems

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) establishes the trustworthiness of service providers and consumers in several domains; including the Internet of Things (IoT). Given the proliferation of Blockchain technology, we find it compelling to reconsider the assumption of trust and centralised governance typically practised in SLA management including monitoring, compliance assessment, and penalty enforcement. Therefore, we argue that, such critical tasks should be operated by blockchain-based smart contracts in a non-repudiable manner beyond the influence of any SLA party. This paper envisions an IoT scenario wherein a firefighting station outsources end-to-end IoT operations to a specialised service provider. The contractual relationship between them is governed by an SLA which stipulates a set of quality requirements and violation consequences. The main contribution of this paper lies in designing, deploying and empirically experimenting a novel blockchain-based SLA monitoring and compliance assessment framework in the context of IoT. This is done by utilising Hyperledger Fabric (HLF), an enterprise-grade blockchain technology. Our work highlights a set of considerations and best practice at two sides, the IoT application monitoring-side and the blockchain-side. Moreover, it experimentally validates the reliability of the proposed monitoring approach, which collects relevant metrics from each IoT component and examines them against the quality requirements stated in the SLA. Finally, we propose a novel design for smart contracts at the blockchain-side, analyse and benchmark the performance, and demonstrate that the new design proves to successfully handle Multiversion Concurrency Control (MVCC) conflicts typically encountered in blockchain applications, while maintaining sound throughput and latency.

Using dynamic voltage frequency scaling and service‐level agreement to reduce energy consumption in cloud datacenters based on distance

AbstractEnergy consumption in cloud is an important topic. Previous works have reduced energy consumption, but have not consider and optimal selection of servers in a datacenter. In our paper, we try to elicit optimal selection of servers in a datacenter. We will modify the architecture of the system and the proposed algorithm using service‐level agreement (SLA) for datacenter servers in this selection, we consider the distance between the servers and the job and if there is a violation of SLA, the migration of virtual machines (VMs) occurs. On the other hand, unnecessary migration of VMs increases energy consumption. So we provide an algorithm for migrating VMs, and because we need task scheduling to perform tasks in the cloud, we will also provide algorithms for tasks migrating. Energy consumption is important for us, we use dynamic voltage frequency scaling to reduce energy consumption. On the other hand, the selection of service providers is done in the SLA management, and these service providers are located on different datacenters, we consider the parameter of the distance to the service consumer in selecting the appropriate datacenter.

Runtime Management of Service Level Agreements through Proactive Resource Provisioning for a Cloud Environment

By leveraging the Internet, cloud computing allows users to have on-demand access to large pools of configurable computing resources. PaaS (Platform as a Service), IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), and SaaS (Software as a Service) are three basic categories for the services provided by cloud the computing environments. Quality of service (QoS) metrics like reliability, availability, performance, and cost determine which resources and services are available in a cloud computing scenario. Provider and the user-specified performance characteristics, such as, rejection rate, throughput, response time, financial cost, and energy consumption, form the basis for QoS. To fulfil the needs of its customers, cloud computing must ensure that its services are given with the appropriate quality of service QoS. A “A legally enforceable agreement known as a “Service Level Agreement” (SLA) between a service provider and a customer that outlines service objectives, quality of service requirements, and any associated financial penalties for falling short. We, therefore, presented “A Proactive Resource Supply based Run-time Monitoring of SLA in Cloud Computing”, which allows for the proactive management of SLAs during run-time via the provisioning of cloud services and resources. Within the framework of the proposed work, SLAs are negotiated between cloud users and providers at run-time utilizing SLA Manager. Resources are proactively allocated via the Resource Manager to cut down on SLA violations and misdetection costs. As metrics of performance, we looked at the frequency with which SLAs were broken and the money lost due to false positives. We compared the proposed PRP-RM-SLA model’s simulated performance to the popular existing SLA-based allocation strategy SCOOTER. According to simulation data, the suggested PRP-RM-SLA model is 25% more effective than the current work SCOOTER at reducing SLA breaches and the cost of misdetection.

AWESOME: an auction and witness enhanced SLA model for decentralized cloud marketplaces

In recent decades, the world has witnessed cloud computing as an essential technology that changes the traditional application Development and Operation (DevOps) lifecycle. However, current cloud software DevOps and Service Level Agreement (SLA) management often face challenges of 1) selecting the best fitting service providers, customizing services and planning capacities for large-scale distributed applications; 2) guaranteeing high-quality and trustworthy SLAs among multiple service providers; 3) enhancing the interoperability of cloud services across different providers; and 4) designing effective incentive models among stakeholders. This paper proposes a novel framework called Auction and Witness Enhanced trustworthy SLA for Open, decentralized service MarkEtplaces (AWESOME) to build a trustworthy cloud marketplace and address the above challenges. The proposed framework contains four subsystems: a customizable graphical user interface, an auction-based service selection model, a witness committee management mechanism, and a smart contract factory orchestration. We developed a prototype AWESOME decentralized application (DApp) based on the Ethereum blockchain. Extensive experiments are designed to evaluate the latency and cost of our model. The experimental results demonstrate that our model is economical and feasible.

SLA-aware operational efficiency in AI-enabled service chains: challenges ahead

Service providers compose services in service chains that require deep integration of core operational information systems across organizations. Additionally, advanced analytics inform data-driven decision-making in corresponding AI-enabled business processes in today’s complex environments. However, individual partner engagements with service consumers and providers often entail individually negotiated, highly customized Service Level Agreements (SLAs) comprising engagement-specific metrics that semantically differ from general KPIs utilized on a broader operational (i.e., cross-client) level. Furthermore, the number of unique SLAs to be managed increases with the size of such service chains. The resulting complexity pushes large organizations to employ dedicated SLA management systems, but such ‘siloed’ approaches make it difficult to leverage insights from SLA evaluations and predictions for decision-making in core business processes, and vice versa. Consequently, simultaneous optimization for both global operational process efficiency and engagement-specific SLA compliance is hampered. To address these shortcomings, we propose our vision of supplying online, AI-supported SLA analytics to data-driven, intelligent core workflows of the enterprise and discuss current research challenges arising from this vision. Exemplified by two scenarios derived from real use cases in industry and public administration, we demonstrate the need for improved semantic alignment of heavily customized SLAs with AI-enabled operational systems. Moreover, we discuss specific challenges of prescriptive SLA analytics under multi-engagement SLA awareness and how the dual role of AI in such scenarios demands bidirectional data exchange between operational processes and SLA management. Finally, we discuss the implications of federating AI-supported SLA analytics across organizations.

Service Level Agreement Monitoring as a Service: An Independent Monitoring Service for Service Level Agreements in Clouds.

The cloud network is rapidly growing due to a massive increase in interconnected devices and the emergence of different technologies such as the Internet of things, fog computing, and artificial intelligence. In response, cloud computing needs reliable dealings among the service providers, brokers, and consumers. The existing cloud monitoring frameworks such as Amazon Cloud Watch, Paraleap Azure Watch, and Rack Space Cloud Kick work under the control of service providers. They work fine; however, this may create dissatisfaction among customers over Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations. Customers' dissatisfaction may drastically reduce the businesses of service providers. To cope with the earlier mentioned issue and get in line with cloud philosophy, Monitoring as a Service (MaaS), completely independent in nature, is needed for observing and regulating the cloud businesses. However, the existing MaaS frameworks do not address the comprehensive SLA for customer satisfaction and penalties management. This article proposes a reliable framework for monitoring the provider's services by adopting third-party monitoring services with clearcut SLA and penalties management. Since this framework monitors SLA as a cloud monitoring service, it is named as SLA-MaaS. On violations, it penalizes those who are found in breach of terms and condition enlisted in SLA. Simulation results confirmed that the proposed framework adequately satisfies the customers (as well as service providers). This helps in developing a trustworthy relationship among cloud partners and increases customer attention and retention.

A digital twin network solution for end-to-end network service level agreement (SLA) assurance

With the gradual development of the 5G industry network and applications, each industry application has various network performance requirements, while customers hope to upgrade their industrial structures by leveraging 5G technologies. The guarantee of service level agreement (SLA) requirements is becoming more and more important, especially SLA performance indicators, such as delay, jitter, bandwidth, etc. For network operators to fulfill customer’s requirements, emerging network technologies such as time-sensitive networking (TSN), edge computing (EC) and network slicing are introduced into the mobile network to improve network performance, which increase the complexity of the network operation and maintenance (O&M), as well as the network cost. As a result, operators urgently need new solutions to achieve low-cost and high-efficiency network SLA management. In this paper, a digital twin network (DTN) solution is innovatively proposed to achieve the mapping and full lifecycle management of the end-to-end physical network. All the network operation policies such as configuration and modification can be generated and verified inside the digital twin network first to make sure that the SLA requirements can be fulfilled without affecting the related network environment and the performance of the other network services, making network operation and maintenance more effective and accurate.

Service-Level Agreement Negotiation in Cloud Computing Buying Organizations

The cloud archetype is fundamentally dynamic for both service customer and service provider. From the provider's perspective, resources are removed and/or added irregularly and urgently together with updating of service level agreements (SLAs). However, this dynamical behavior makes contracting sophisticated. Yet, there is a lack of knowledge on how to handle these dynamics contractually. To address this knowledge gap, the authors have investigated “how to improve SLA management with dynamic SLA iterations.” For this reason, a model for cloud computing SLA negotiation is proposed to facilitate the buying organization in determining uncertainty by analyzing attributes of asset specificity and risks associated with them. Survey research has been used for testing the model. The respondents rationalized the SLA negotiation with a better cognitive understanding in all phases within the model. The study's findings could support cloud service buying organizations to minimize the risks with ever-changing requirements.

Adapted smart home services based on smart contracts and service level agreements

SummaryIn smart home systems (SHS), devices intercommunicate to create an intelligent environment that can monitor the inhabitant's health state and provide adapted services. However, existing health monitoring systems (HMS) do not provide adapted services to the patient autonomy degree. Furthermore, in these critical systems, the Quality of Service (QoS) aspect is very important; therefore, service level agreements (SLA) are the best solution to define and guarantee the expected QoS levels, nevertheless, existing SLA specification languages lack expressiveness in terms of user preference specification, dynamic service management and pricing. In this work, we propose an elderly health state‐aware SHS to offer adapted services according to the elderly health state, it is based on three main parts: (a) the functional autonomy measurement system (SMAF) for calculating the inhabitant's profile or autonomy degree, (b) domain‐specific language (DSL) for SLA that aims to increase patient‐awareness through the use of preferences, facilitate the SLA management using microservices, and manage the QoS dynamically using multilevel SLA (ML‐SLA) concept, and (c) smart contracts for the provision of adapted services and the verification of SLA terms.

Smart Contracts for Service-Level Agreements in Edge-to-Cloud Computing

The management of Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) in Edge-to-Cloud computing is a complex task due to the great heterogeneity of computing infrastructures and networks and their varying runtime conditions, which influences the resulting Quality of Service (QoS). SLA-management should be supported by formal assurances, ranking and verification of various microservice deployment options. This work introduces a novel Smart Contract (SC) based architecture that provides for SLA management among relevant entities and actors in a decentralised computing environment: Virtual Machines (VMs), Cloud service consumers and Cloud providers. Its key components are especially designed SC functions, a trustless Smart Oracle (Chainlink) and a probabilistic Markov Decision Process. The novel architecture is implemented on Ethereum ledger (testnet). The results show its feasibility for SLA management including low costs operation within dynamic and decentralised Edge-to-Cloud federations.

RETRACTED ARTICLE: SLA-aware load balancing using risk management framework in cloud

In cloud computing environment, load balancing is an important task. So many of the researchers had focused on load balanced scheduling technique. Those provides better load balancing in cloud but there are some issues like resource allocation and cost maintenance. One of the major issue in load balancing techniques is service level agreement (SLA) management because many of them are affected by this SLA-violation. Many researchers have proposed various risk based framework but few of them has guides the service provider to take steps for SLA violation abatement and they also need some improvements. To tackle this problem, a new SLA-aware risk management framework (SA-RMF) is proposed in this work for efficient load balancing in cloud. A new technique is presented here based on CPU parameter for generating efficient dynamic threshold. A better quality of service values prediction is achieved by using hybrid approach in SA-RMF. Through experiments, the appropriateness of proposed system is demonstrated and validated that it helps cloud providers to mitigate future violations of services and consequences.

SLA Management for Big Data Analytical Applications in Clouds

Recent years have witnessed the booming of big data analytical applications (BDAAs). This trend provides unrivaled opportunities to reveal the latent patterns and correlations embedded in the data, and thus productive decisions may be made. This was previously a grand challenge due to the notoriously high dimensionality and scale of big data, whereas the quality of service offered by providers is the first priority. As BDAAs are routinely deployed on Clouds with great complexities and uncertainties, it is a critical task to manage the service level agreements (SLAs) so that a high quality of service can then be guaranteed. This study performs a systematic literature review of the state of the art of SLA-specific management for Cloud-hosted BDAAs. The review surveys the challenges and contemporary approaches along this direction centering on SLA. A research taxonomy is proposed to formulate the results of the systematic literature review. A new conceptual SLA model is defined and a multi-dimensional categorization scheme is proposed on its basis to apply the SLA metrics for an in-depth understanding of managing SLAs and the motivation of trends for future research.

Distributed service‐level agreement management with smart contracts and blockchain

SummaryThe current cloud market is dominated by a few providers, which offer cloud services in a take‐it‐or‐leave‐it manner. However, the dynamism and uncertainty of cloud environments may require the change over time of both application requirements and service capabilities. The current service‐level agreement (SLA) management solutions cannot easily guarantee a trustworthy, distributed SLA adaptation due to the centralized authority of the cloud provider who could also misbehave to pursue individual goals. To address the above issues, we propose a novel SLA management framework, which facilitates the specification and enforcement of dynamic SLAs that enable one to describe how, and under which conditions, the offered service level can change over time. The proposed framework relies on a two‐level blockchain architecture. At the first level, the smart SLA is transformed into a smart contract that dynamically guides service provisioning. At the second level, a permissioned blockchain is built through a federation of monitoring entities to generate objective measurements for the smart SLA/contract assessment. The scalability of this permissioned blockchain is also thoroughly evaluated. The proposed framework enables creating open distributed clouds, which offer manageable and dynamic services, and facilitates cost reduction for cloud consumers, while it increases flexibility in resource management and trust in the offered cloud services.

Adaptation of MAPE-K and Fuzzy Q-Learning in SLA management

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is the legal catalyst to monitor any contract violation between end users and ISPs and is embedded within a Quality of Service (QoS) framework. The key to the proposed architecture is the utilization of self-capabilities designed to have self-management over uncertainties and the provision of self-adaptive interactions. Thus, the Monitor, Analyse, Plan, Execute and Knowledge Base (MAPE-K) approach can deal with this problem together with the integration of Fuzzy and Q-Learning algorithms. The proposed experiment is in the context of autonomic computing. An adaptation manager is the main proposed component to update admission control on the ISP current resources and the ability to manage SLAs.The proposed solution, demonstrating Q-Learning works adaptive with QoS parameters, e.g. Latency, Availability and Packet Loss. With the combination of fuzzy and Q-Learning, we demonstrate that the proposed adaptation manager is able to handle the uncertainties and learning abilities. Q-Learning is able to identify the initial state from various ISPs iterations and update them with appropriate actions, reflecting the reward configurations. The higher the iterations process the higher is the increase the learning ability, rewards and exploration probability.

Service Broker-Based Architecture Using Multi-Criteria Decision Making for Service Level Agreement

With the on-going trends of the telecom services, the number of service providers with similar functionalities is undergoing a rapid growth. The customers face the difficulty to decide which service provider can satisfy their needs and full their requirements. Negotiating contracts between involved parts, and hiding heterogeneity in the distributed network environment has been challenging for telecom operators and service providers. Different languages exist to describe the Service Level Agreement (SLA), which is a contract between a service provider and a customer. However, since each service provider expresses his SLA in his own way, it disrupts the customer's choice of the best service provider, and leads to a bad contract management. In this respect, we propose a novel architecture for service selection, and SLA management between different stakeholders in our network architecture. The idea is to set up a smart broker where we implemented a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) method to maximize utility function so that the customer can choose services with required QoS performances. We also came up with the idea of settling a negotiation model for the SLA, and a context based SLA contract ontology in IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) network is also proposed to provide users with a clear model to express their requirements and preferences. Moreover, we used the New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) Framework to model and analyze networks and services actions. To better understand the relationship and the projection of NGOSS Framework and IMS platform, we introduce an SLA management and monitoring architecture in IMS network.