Cost Reduction through SLA-driven Self-Management

A main challenge for service providers is managing service-level agreements (SLAs) with their customers while satisfying their business objectives, such as maximizing profits. Most current systems fail to consider business objectives and thus to provide a complete SLA management solution. This work proposes an SLA-driven management solution that aims to maximize the provider's profit by reducing resource costs as well as fines owning to SLA violations. Specifically, this work proposes a framework that comprises multiple, configurable control loops and supports automatically adjusting service configurations and resource usage in order to maintain SLAs in the most cost-effective way. The framework targets services implemented on top of large-scale distributed infrastructures, such as clouds. Experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness in maintaining SLAs while reducing provider costs.