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Kno.e.sis Publications Enabled Computing (Kno.e.sis)

2009

Service Level Agreement in Cloud Computing

Pankesh Patel
Wright State University - Main Campus

Ajith H. Ranabahu
Wright State University - Main Campus

Amit P. Sheth
Wright State University - Main Campus, [email protected]

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Patel, P., Ranabahu, A. H., & Sheth, A. P. (2009). Service Level Agreement in Cloud Computing. .
https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/knoesis/78

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 Service Level Agreement in Cloud Computing

Pankesh Patel1,2 , Ajith Ranabahu1 , Amit Sheth1

1
Knoesis Center, Wright State University, USA
{ajith,amit}@knoesis.org
2
DA-IICT, Gandhinagar, INDIA
pankesh [email protected]

Abstract. Cloud computing that provides cheap and pay-as-you-go com-

puting resources is rapidly gaining momentum as an alternative to tra-
ditional IT Infrastructure. As more and more consumers delegate their
tasks to cloud providers, Service Level Agreements(SLA) between con-
sumers and providers emerge as a key aspect. Due to the dynamic na-
ture of the cloud, continuous monitoring on Quality of Service (QoS)
attributes is necessary to enforce SLAs. Also numerous other factors
such as trust (on the cloud provider) come into consideration, particu-
larly for enterprise customers that may outsource its critical data. This
complex nature of the cloud landscape warrants a sophisticated means of
managing SLAs. This paper proposes a mechanism for managing SLAs
in a cloud computing environment using the Web Service Level Agree-
ment(WSLA) framework, developed for SLA monitoring and SLA en-
forcement in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). We use the third
party support feature of WSLA to delegate monitoring and enforcement
tasks to other entities in order to solve the trust issues. We also present
a real world use case to validate our proposal.

KEYWORDS: Cloud Computing, Web Service Level Agreement, Ser-

vice Level Objectives, SLA monitoring, SLA enforcement, Cloud Secu-
rity.

1 Introduction
Cloud computing [1] is the new trend of computing where readily available com-
puting resources are exposed as a service. These computing resources are gen-
erally offered as pay-as-you-go plans and hence have become attractive to cost
conscious customers. Apart from the cost, cloud computing also supports the
growing concerns of carbon emissions and environmental impact since the cloud
advocates better management of resources. We see a growing trend of off-loading
the previously in-house service systems to the cloud, based primarily on the cost
and the maintenance burden. Such a move allows businesses to focus on their
core competencies and not burden themselves with back office operations.
Cloud is defined as both the applications delivered as services over the In-
ternet and the hardware and systems software in the data centers that provide
those services [1]. According to this definition delivery of application as services
(SaaS - Software as a Service) over the Internet and hardware services (IaaS -
Infrastructure as a Service) are both parts of cloud computing phenomena. From
hardware service(utility computing) point of view, there are few new aspects in
cloud [1], the most prominent being the illusion of infinite computing resources
and the ability to pay for use of computing resources on a short-term basis as
needed.
As consumers move towards adopting such a Service-Oriented Architecture,
the quality and reliability of the services become important aspects. However the
demands of the service consumers vary significantly. It is not possible to fulfill all
consumer expectations from the service provider perspective and hence a balance
needs to be made via a negotiation process. At the end of the negotiation process,
provider and consumer commit to an agreement. In SOA terms, this agreement
is referred to as a SLA. This SLA serves as the foundation for the expected
level of service between the consumer and the provider. The QoS attributes that
are generally part of an SLA (such as response time and throughput) however
change constantly and to enforce the agreement, these parameters need to be
closely monitored [2].
Due to the complex nature of consumer demands, a simple ”measure and
trigger” process may not work for SLA enforcement. Four different types of
monitoring demands made by consumers are mentioned in [3]. One scenario is
a consumer demands the data exposed by a service provider without further re-
finement such as transaction count, which is a raw metric. Second scenario is
consumer requests that collected data should put into meaningful context. This
scenario creates the requirement for a process which collects data from different
sources and applies suitable algorithms for calculating meaningful results. Such
metrics include statistical measures such as average or standard deviation that
need to be computed from a raw set of numbers. The third scenario is the con-
sumer requests certain customized data to be collected. In the fourth scenario the
consumer even specifies the way how data should be collected. Both the latter
mentioned scenarios imply an advanced consumer who would have a knowledge
of the inner workings of a provider and somewhat rare in practice. Other issues
such as trust also need to be considered during SLA enforcement. For example
consumers may not completely trust the certain measurements provided solely
by a service provider and regularly employ third party mediators. These media-
tors are responsible for measuring the critical service parameters and reporting
violations of the agreement from either party.
We believe the upcoming trend of cloud computing is an extension of the
SOA paradigm and the above mentioned issue of striking a balance applies to
the cloud as well. The process of managing the provider-consumer agreements
in computing clouds closely resemble the generic provider-consumer agreement
process we mentioned above. Hence we propose an architecture for managing
cloud consumer and provider SLAs, based on the WSLA specification [3].
We highlight two reasons to justify the importance of this research.

1. The most prominent cloud provider, Amazon EC2, puts the burden of prov-
ing SLA violations on the consumer. i.e. the consumer should take steps to
 enforce the SLA [4]. Having a formalized SLA enables the set up of the en-
forcement process to be automated and hence relieves consumers from that
burden.
2. We believe the work that significantly intersects with ours is [5] where WSLA
has been used as a base for grid service monitoring. However computing grids
are very different from computing clouds in terms of 1) business model, 2)
architecture, 3) resource management, 4) programming model, 5) application
model and 6) security model [6]. Hence we believe applying WSLA to the
cloud context would be a significantly different effort from the previous work.
Some of the important aspects we discovered are detailed in section 4. To
the best of our knowledge this is the first use of WSLA in the context of
cloud computing.
In the rest of this paper we present the related work [section 2] and introduce the
WSLA framework [section 3]. Then we present our architecture proposal [section
4] and provide a use case based on a real world cloud usage scenario [section 5].
We conclude the paper with a detailed discussion [section 6] on the architecture
as well as the pros and cons of our proposal.

2 Related Work
Significant level of research in SLAs has been performed during standardizing
efforts. There are two main specifications for describing a SLA for web services.
1)Web Service Agreement [7](WS-Agreement) from Open Grid forum (OGF) and
2) Web Service Level Agreement language and framework (WSLA) [3] from IBM.
To the best of our knowledge, other most prominent ongoing research project
for SLA specification is SLAng [8]. In other related work, Rule-based Service
Level Agreement(RBSLA) [9] is highlighted. RBSLA follows a knowledge based
approach and uses RuleML [10] to specify the SLA.
Another relevant specification in this context is WS-Policy[11] from the World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C). By using WS-Policy, Service providers can ad-
vertise their policies. On the other hand service consumers can also specify their
policy requirements. These policies primarily consist of non-functional proper-
ties. Web Service Offering Language[12](WSOL), Web Service Modeling Ontol-
ogy [13](WSMO) and Web Service Management layer [14](WSML) all provide
some level of description for non-functional properties. However all the above
work is not in the direct context of SLA.

3 Background - WSLA framework

As described in [3], WSLA consists of a set of concepts and a XML language. It
is designed to capture service level agreements in a formal way. WSLA comprises
of mainly three entities.
1. Parties: WSLA contains the descriptions about 1) service provider, 2) ser-
vice consumer and 3) third parties. The task of these third parties may
 vary from measuring service parameters to taking actions on violations as
delegated by either the service provider and service consumer.
2. SLA parameters: In WSLA, SLA parameters are specified by metrics.
Metrics define how service parameters can be measured and are typically
functions. There are at least two major types of metrics. 1)Resource metrics
are retrieved directly from the provider resources and are used as is without
further processing. For example, transaction count. 2) Composite metrics
represents a combination of several resource metrics, calculated according
to a specific algorithm. For example transactions per hour combines the
raw resource metrics of transaction count and uptime. Composite metrics
are required when the consumers need insightful and contextual information
where raw numbers do not suffice. In [2], a third metrics referred to as a
business metric has been defined. It relates SLA parameters to financial
terms specific to a service customer.
3. Service Level Objectives(SLOs): A set of formal expressions. These for-
mal expressions have the well known if...then structure. The antecedent (if )
contains conditions and the consequent (then) contains actions. An action
represents what a party has agreed to perform when the conditions are met.

Figure 1 illustrates the major components of WSLA in a UML diagram [3].

An established WSLA contains the following major sections:
1. Parties:This section comprises of two parties : supporting parties and sig-
natory parties. Signatory parties are the service provider and the service
consumer. Supporting parties are the third parties that come into picture
when signatory parties decide to delegate certain tasks such as measuring
SLA parameters.
2. Service Definitions: A service definition contains the description of the
service providers interface. Services are represented by service objects. Each
service object associates with one or more SLA parameters.
3. Obligations: This section contains the conditions and the action guarantees.

4 Architecture
Now we present our cloud WSLA architecture. We have realized the following
aspects of the cloud that effects the direct use of WSLA.

1. The cloud is inherently dynamic and the resource usage changes dynamically.
Hence any system that tries to enforce a SLA need to embrace this dynamic
nature. We suggest that all measuring tasks in a cloud context be performed
through functions[3]. We identify certain measurements the cloud providers
must provide and discuss them later in this section.
2. Due to the mounting concerns of privacy and data security, consumers may
be hesitant to disclose certain details to cloud providers. We identify a set
of tasks that can be delegated to trusted third parties to cater for better
security.
Fig. 1. Main Concepts of WSLA
Fig. 2. Architecture
 3. Cloud services are subjected to load fluctuations and SLA violations are more
likely to happen during these transitions. The nature of these fluctuations are
unpredictable and hence a static schedule for evaluating conditions may not
suffice. We suggest that SLAs in the cloud context use a dynamic schedule
for condition evaluations.

We present our proposed architecture in figure 2. In this architecture, we

have assumed that the cloud provider and the cloud consumer already partici-
pated in the negotiation process and have an agreed set of service parameters,
i.e. the negotiation and SLA establishment steps are considered out of scope for
this work. Once the SLA document is established, it needs to be deployed. In
[2] the term SLA deployment is defined as the process of validating and dis-
tributing the SLA, in part or full, to the involved parties. The work [2] identifies
that the provider and the consumer may not want to share the complete SLA
document with supporting parties due to security considerations. We describe
three common WSLA services [2] and some of their adaptations required in the
cloud context.

1. Measurement Services: These services are responsible for measuring the

runtime parameters of cloud providers resources. As discussed previously,
service parameters like response time, throughput are constantly changed
due to variability in service request from consumer side. In the context of
the cloud however the usage and cost parameters are also dynamic. This is
due to the pay-as-you-go nature and the elasticity of the cloud. Hence we
identify 1) usage and 2) cost / price data as two major additional services
that should be added to the set of measurement services in the context of
clouds.
2. Condition Evaluation Service: This service is responsible of getting the
results from measurement services and evaluating the Service Level Objec-
tives. If there are violations the Management service will be contacted. We
believe that due to the dynamic nature of the cloud, the condition evalu-
ation needs to be performed more frequently than in a traditional service
framework. Traditionally there is little attention on the complexity of condi-
tions. In the cloud context, we propose that conditions be simpler for faster
evaluation cycles.
We add a dynamic scheduler that depends on a metric like the transac-
tion rate. This ensures that when the load is high, the enforcement check
runs more frequently since its most likely the violations happen during such
transitions.
3. Management Service: This service is responsible for taking corrective ac-
tions on violation of the Service Level Objectives. We anticipate that since
the cloud represents utility type computing resources, the management ser-
vice would be primarily handling financial penalties similar to the real world
utility industry practices.
5 A Scenario From The Real World

Now we present a use case, influenced by the use of cloud computing in the
computer gaming industry. Compute clouds are being increasingly utilized by
on-line games vendors due to the cost benefits and the flexibility [15]. Our use
case tries to highlight the SLA aspect of such a gaming vendor that want to
utilize the cloud. As mentioned in section 1, X Inc has significant benefits in
formalizing this SLA.
X Inc, a creator of on-line multi player games wants to utilize a computing
cloud to deploy the core gaming process for their latest game. X Inc is not very
sure how this game will be accepted by the public and they do not want to make
an upfront commitment on the resources they allocate for this game. Hence
X Inc decided to choose a cloud computing platform that supports automatic
scaling. However X Inc wants a set of guarantees on the response time in order
to retain the interested gamers. Although X Inc is ready to maintain a decent
response time, they have a threshold for the maximum hourly cost in order to
maintain their budgetary constraints. If the response time constraints are not
met, X Inc is likely to loose some of their gamers and hence will penalize the
cloud provider in case of such a violation. Z Inc provides cost/price services
and quality measurements services for cost and resource usage calculation of
consumers. For verification purposes X Inc also hires Y-accounting, a trusted
third party for resource usage and cost calculation. Y-accounting is responsible
for handling finances on behalf of X Inc and SLA violations are directly reported
to Y-accounting.
This typical scenario requires that X Inc, with their cloud provider Z Inc, cre-
ate a SLA with the above mentioned constraints. This SLA include the following
SLOs.

1. The maximum hourly cost (Cmax ) needs to be below CT hrmax

2. The average response time (RTavg ) needs to be below T hravg subjected to
condition 1.
3. The maximum response time (RTmax ) needs to be below T hrmax subjected
to condition 1.

Z Inc. is not capable of calculating any of the composite metrics mentioned in

the SLA. Z Inc, however is capable of providing the running time and unit costs.
Hence during the SLA negotiation process, Z Inc agreed to let a third party
measurement service to measure the response times, and allow yet another third
party service to use their time and cost services on behalf of X Inc.
Composite metrics like RTavg and RTmax are calculated by third party ser-
vices using the collected values. Cmax is also calculated using the data from
cost/price services and usage services. Condition evaluation service queries the
appropriate measurement services for the relevant values according to attached
dynamic schedule. On receiving the values, condition evaluation service evaluates
the SLO predicates. In case of SLA violations, management service is notified
and Y-accounting is contacted to process the financial penalties.
6 Discussion

As indicated in this proposed architecture, We see a very legitimate need for

a clear and formal methodology to handle SLAs in the context of cloud com-
puting. WSLA, which suggests a very flexible architecture for managing SLAs
between providers and consumers, seem to be the most suitable candidate. In
applying WSLA however, the need for a host of support services arise. Some
cloud computing providers may provide these support services but WSLA does
not strictly mandate such provisions and hence third parties can step into pro-
vide the necessary services. We see this as one of the strong points of WSLA
where, true to the paradigm of SOA, every functionality is provided as a service
that may not necessarily come from the same provider.
One important observation we make in the context of clouds is the lack of
standardization. This is specially important when we attempt to apply monitor-
ing across multiple clouds. Even though it is possible to cater for different cloud
interfaces through a middleware, there is no universal set of metrics that can be
monitored across cloud providers. There are attempts to standardize the clouds
[16] and we underscore the importance of such efforts in the light of monitoring
capabilities. As a part of these standardization efforts, we also suggest a set of
basic metrics and best practices for measurements be established.

7 Future Work

We see many avenues of future research in this area. One such avenue is based on
scalability, which is considered an important aspect of cloud computing. Clouds
however may not be able to scale indefinitely and when a resource limitation
is encountered, a service provider may decide to delegate the tasks to other
cloud providers, transparent to the consumer to avoid significant SLA violation
penalties. Such a scenario creates research opportunities in SLA management.
We anticipate to investigate SLA aspects like accounting, monitoring of QoS
parameters and condition violation in similar scenarios as future work.
The current WSLA framework is based on XML and therefore limits the
ability of matching in composition metrics to syntactical. Semantic Web tech-
nologies can be used to enhance the descriptions and hence improve the quality
of these matches. We believe that work done in [17] is relevant in this regard
and can be extended to the cloud context.

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