Engineering Proprioception in SLA Management for Cloud Architectures

With the wide adoption of the Cloud, there remains an open challenge to provide more dependable, transparent, and trustworthy provision of services. Service terms are typically defined in the Service Level Agreement (SLA) binding both service providers and users. For the service user, there is a need to ensure that s/he is enjoying the agreed level of service and any violations are reported accordingly. For the service provider, there is a need to manage a resilient infrastructure capable of meeting SLA terms and inform strategies for maximising profit and resource utilisation. The massive size, dynamism and unpredictability of Cloud architectures makes these goals difficult to accomplish using classic Service Level Management (SLM) approaches. In this paper, we motivate the need for novel dynamic and decentralised approaches for the design of SLM. Requirements and key design decisions for the new SLM are described. Also, a conceptual architecture for realising these requirements is presented. We roadmap and discuss research directions, which can benefit from the new SLM.