Investigation of SLA Management in Cloud Computing and Future Directions

Cloud computing is an on-demand service provisioning technology in which computer and networking resources like software applications, computation power, storage space and software based network devices are provided to the customer under a service level agreement (SLA). In dynamic environment of cloud computing service level agreement and its management is very crucial component from customer's trust and long term business opportunity point of view. The SLA management process includes many activities such as SLA Negotiation, SLA Pricing and SLA Monitoring etc. Many SLA management approaches have been proposed by researchers. This paper systematically investigates different research publications branching form SLA management into different directions and assesses the relative extent of research done so far in each direction. The analysis reveals that latest trends in SLA related research are SLA violations, Auditing, and development of SLA frameworks.