As part of a Service Level Agreement (SLA), a service provider and its customer agree on non-functional or Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, which may be part of the pricing model. Predicting service quality attributes before service run-time helps to specify feasible SLA parameters and to consolidate efficient resource utilization with guarantees on QoS metrics.
Design-time [...]
Over the last few years, several approaches have been developed to support the monitoring of SLAs. Typically, these approaches collect events during service executions and use them to check whether the properties of service provision as specified in an SLA are satisfied. Such approaches provide state of the art mechanisms for performing the basic checks [...]
In recent years, significant advances have been made in SLA management. This progress has largely focused on the building pieces necessary to create the communications, interactions and corresponding flows required for SLA management. However, to be truly useful, support for the business aspects and terms required in the real business world also need to be [...]
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) represents an architectural shift for building business applications based on loosely coupled services. In a multi-layered SOA environment the exact conditions under which services are to be delivered can be formally specified by Service Level Agreements (SLAs). However, typical SLAs are just specified at the top-level and do not allow service providers [...]
The financial sector depends heavily on process and data intensive computations to deliver competitive advantage. Financial applications are particularly suited to grid-based experimentation and research. A Financial Live Trading System is used an exemplar in this article. The emerging growth of worldwide trading and the reliance on automated processing has increased the complexity and volatility [...]
Originally, (Web) services were deployed and used with almost no actual control by the different parties. The simplistic assumption that their behavior was correct and everyone had to be happy with the functionality provided was unrealistic. The actual exploitation of services, imposed us to start conceiving different methods and tools to manage the complete life-cycle of deployed and running services with special emphasis on the actual run-time behavior.
An essential part of an SLA-aware infrastructure is a scalable and self-sufficient monitoring system capable of monitoring large distributed systems, in real-time. The monitoring system must support two mutually exclusive perspectives arising from the Service Level Agreement, namely the customer’s perspective and the infrastructure/service provider’s perspective. The former is interested in the SLA alone, while [...]
The Open Virtualisation Format (OVF) is a schema for describing a virtual machine or a collection of virtual machines. The initiative is the results of efforts by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) who, amongst other standards, are responsible for the Common Information Model (CIM).
Our project is about managing Service Level Agreements, so in this post it is a good opportunity to discuss them in general and see some aspects of their management.
SLA@SOI is dedicated towards building an SLA-aware service oriented infrastructure. A key component of this will be the layer managing the infrastructure, and we are envisioning that this must be able to handle internet-scale deployments. Management of an environment with hundreds of thousands of nodes places significant demands on communication channels, and SLA@SOI is currently investigating how protocols like XMPP might help address these needs.
