Service level agreement parameter matching in cloud computing

Abstract

Cloud is a large pool of easily usable and accessible virtualized resources (such as hardware, development platforms and/or software services). It provides an on-demand, pay-asyo-ugo computing resources and had become an alternative to traditional IT infrastructure. As more and more consumers delegate their task to cloud providers, Service Level Agreement (SLA) between consumer and provider becomes an important aspect. Due to the dynamic nature of cloud the matching of service level agreement need to be dynamic and continuous monitoring of Quality of Service (QoS) is necessary to enforce SLAs. This complex nature of cloud warrants a sophisticated means of managing SLAs. SLA contains many parameters like cloud’s types of services, resources (physical memory, main memory, processor speed, ethernet speed etc.) and properties (availability, response time, server reboot time etc.). At present, actual Cloud SLAs are typically plain-text documents, and sometimes an informative document published online. Consumer needs to manually match application requirements with each and every cloud provider to identify compatible cloud provider. This work addresses the issue of matching SLA parameters to find best suitable cloud provider. Proposed algorithm identifies the compatible cloud provider by matching parameters of application requirements and cloud SLAs. It gives suggestion to a consumer in terms of number of matched parameters.