Fault-tolerant Service Level Agreement lifecycle management in clouds using actor system

Abstract

Automated Service Level Agreements (SLAs) have been proposed for cloud services as contracts used to record the rights and obligations of service providers and their customers. Automation refers to the electronic formalized representation of SLAs and the management of their lifecycle by autonomous agents. Most recently, SLA automated management is becoming increasingly of importance. In previous work, we have elaborated a utility architecture that optimizes resource deployment according to business policies, as well as a mechanism for optimization in SLA negotiation. We take all that a step further with the application of actor systems as an appropriate theoretical model for fine-grained, yet simplified and practical, monitoring of massive sets of SLAs. We show that this is a realistic approach for the automated management of the complete SLA lifecycle, including negotiation and provisioning, but focus on monitoring as the driver of contemporary scalability requirements. Our proposed work separates the agreement's fault-tolerance concerns and strategies into multiple autonomous layers that can be hierarchically combined into an intuitive, parallelized, effective and efficient management structure. (c) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.