Cloud Service Level Agreements – Issues and Development

Cloud computing is a broad paradigm that has influence across major fields of human endeavour. The unique services it offers makes organisations curious about understanding the cloud and its likely benefits. The cloud offers services such as custom built applications deployed on remote systems and ready to use platforms which reduce the efforts needed to develop and deploy applications for cloud users. In addition to these, there are other services such as storage and infrastructural resources which the cloud also avails to its users. These services are usually provided to users on a pay-per-use bases, thus necessitating the need to have documented agreements in place to ensure a smooth relationship between the providers and the users. These documented agreements are referred to as Service Level Agreements (SLAs). SLAs detail the terms, conditions and service expectation of the users from their service provider in terms of availability, redundancy, uptime, cost and penalties for violations. These ensures users' confidence in the services being offered. In this paper, the state of the art with respect to cloud SLAs is presented. The paper seeks to answer questions related of what the current trends and developments in terms of cloud SLA are and it does so by means of a review of existing literature available. This paper therefore is a survey of cloud SLAs, their issues and developmental challenges. It provides a guide for future research and is expected to benefit prospective cloud users and cloud providers alike.