g-Eclipse - Service Level Agreements

In a future service-based IT landscape on the Grid or Cloud, the dynamic negotiation of provisioning and usage of services will play an important role. g-Eclipse provides an extensible framework for the negotiation of Service Level Agreements (SLA) between service providers and service consumers.

The basic process of SLA negotiation contains the following steps:

  1. The service provider starts a service on Grid or Cloud infrastructures. Depending on the infrastructure, such services can already be deployed as a part of a Virtual Organisation or can be deployed in an ad-hoc manner.
  2. The service provider creates a Service Level Template (SLT) file containing the QoS descriptions of the service offer. The SLT is stored on the provider's system.
  3. The service provider publishes the SLT with the help of a service registry. The service registry is similar to Yellow Pages. SLA Process
  4. A customer has a need for a given service and specifies the type of the service and the required service terms (such as availability, response time, bandwidth, number of accounts, etc.).
  5. With the help of the service requirements, the customer queries the service level registry and gets the available services back ranked in order of the requirments. She then select one of the offered SLTs.
  6. The selected SLT is enhanced with the customer's counterparty information and a request for an SLA is sent to the service provider. If the service provider agrees to the proposed SLA, the SLA gets executed and the electronic contract is established.

This process it supported by the generic g-Eclipse SLA framework in the sense that it is independent from a specific SLA schema as well as from a specifc SLA negotiation implementations. The generic process does not support any specific SLA schema editor as in this moment of time it is not clear how a worldwide future SLA schema would look like. The step 1 of the SLA process is independent of any real implementation. In step 2 a dedicated SLA editor based on a dedicated SLA schema is used to create a Service Level Template (SLT), which can be seen as a service offer. With a specific implementation for SLA schemas, the SLT editor can be opened. The following figure shows the example for the NextGRID schema.

SLA Process

When the SLT file is located on the workspace, the SLT can be published with a specific SLA negotiation implementation. The g-Eclipse SLA framework provides as standardized UI popup-menu contribution for *.slt files to do so. Click on the SLT file and select SLA Management/Publish SLT to SLA registry
SLA Process

From now on it is the service consumer who will initiate actions concerning SLA documents. First the service consumer will specify his requirements for a service including the type and different service terms. This is done with the help to the SLA Query wizard. You find the SLA Query wizard with "New -> Other..." under "g-Eclipse --> Query for SLA". On the next page you enter the type of service and/or add new SLA terms to your requirements using the "Add" button of the wizard.
SLA Query Wizard

Based on the requirements and on the SLA requirements, the consumer gets a list of available service offers. The list is shown on the next wizard page. The consumer can select one of the service offers, and the details of the SLA are shown on the next page and the consumer data are entered in the SLA template. Assuming that the user is fine with the SLA terms, on the last wizard page the whole SLA contract including consumer data is presented to the customer. The customer agrees on the contract, and the SLA documents will be sent to the service provider. The support for negotiation process for service level agreements ends here.