UNIT – 5

SLA Management in
cloud computing
 (R18A0523) CLOUD COMPUTING

UNIT- V - SLA Management in cloud computing

Traditional Approaches to SLO Management,

Types of SLA, Life Cycle of SLA, SLA
Management in Cloud.
 Content

1. SLA Management in cloud computing

2. Traditional Approaches to SLO
Management
3. Types of SLA
4. Life Cycle of SLA
5. SLA Management in Cloud.
 [Link] Management in cloud
computing
• A service-level agreement (SLA) is a
commitment between a service provider and a
client.

• Particular aspects of the service, such as quality,

availability, responsibilities are agreed upon
between the service provider and the service user.

• In the early days of web-application deployment,

performance of the application at peak load was a
single important criterion for provisioning server
resources.
• The web applications were hosted on these
dedicated individual servers within enterprises
own server rooms.

• These web applications were used to provide

different kinds of e-services to various clients.

• The service-level objectives (SLOs) for these

applications were response time and throughput
of the application end-user requests.

• The activity of determining the number of

servers and their capacity that could satisfactorily
serve the application end-user requests at peak
loads is called capacity planning.
Hosting of applications on servers
within enterprises data centers
• The planned capacity for each of the
applications to run successfully is three servers.

• As the number of web applications grow, the

server rooms in the organization became large
and such server rooms were known as data
centers.

• These data centers were owned and managed

by the enterprises themselves.

• The enterprises need not invest in procuring

expensive hardware upfront without knowing
the viability of the business.

• The hardware and application maintenance

were non-core activities of their business.
• As the number of web applications grow, the
level of sophistication required to manage the
data centers increased.

• The QoS parameters are related to the

availability of the system CPU, data storage,
and network for efficient execution of the
application at peak loads.

• This legal agreement is known as the service-

level agreement (SLA).
 [Link] Approaches to SLO
Management
• The SLOs can be referred to as measurable
characteristics of an SLA, such as Quality of
Service (QoS) aspects that are achievable,
measurable, meaningful, and acceptable for
both service providers and customers.

• Traditionally, load balancing techniques and

admission control mechanisms, have been used
to provide guaranteed quality of service (QoS)
for hosted web applications.

• These mechanisms can be viewed as the first

attempt towards managing the SLOs.
[Link] Balancing

• The objective of a load balancing is to

distribute the incoming requests onto a set of
physical machines.

• The load balancing algorithm executes on a

physical machine that interfaces with the
clients.

• This physical machine, also called the front-

end node, receives the incoming requests and
distributes these requests to different physical
machines for further execution.
General taxonomy of load-balancing
algorithms.
• Class-agnostic: The front-end node is neither
aware of the type of client from which the
request originates nor aware of the category
(e.g., browsing, selling, payment, etc.) to
which the request belongs to.

• Class-aware: The front-end node must

additionally inspect the type of client making
the request and/or the type of service
requested before deciding which back-end
node should service the request
2. Admission Control
• Admission control algorithms play an important
role in deciding the set of requests that should be
admitted into the application server, when the
server experiences “very” heavy loads.

• During overload situations, since the response

time for all the requests would invariably
degrade if all the arriving requests are admitted
into the server.

• It would be preferable to be selective in

identifying a subset of requests that should be
admitted into the system so that the overall
pay-off is high.
General taxonomy for admission control
mechanisms.
• The objective of admission control mechanisms
is to police the incoming requests, and identify
a subset of incoming requests, that can be
admitted into the system when the system faces
overload situations.

Two types of Mechanisms:

1. Request-based
2. Session-based

Request-based mechanism: It reject new

requests if the servers are running to their
capacity.

• The disadvantage with this approach is that a

client’s session may consist of multiple
requests that are necessarily related.
Session-based mechanisms: It try to ensure that
longer sessions are completed and any new
sessions are rejected.

• Accordingly, once a session is admitted into

the server, all future requests belonging to that
session are admitted as well, even though new
sessions are rejected by the system.
 [Link] of SLA
• Service-level agreement provides a framework
within which both seller and buyer of a service
can pursue a profitable service business
relationship.

• It outlines the broad understanding between the

service provider and the service consumer for
maintaining a mutually beneficial relationship.

• SLA can be modeled using web service-level

agreement (WSLA) language specification.

• Although WSLA is intended for web-service-

based applications, it is equally applicable for
hosting of applications.
Key Components of a Service-Level Agreement
• Two types of SLAs from the perspective of
application hosting.
i) Infrastructure SLA
ii) Application SLA
These are described in detail here.

i) Infrastructure SLA.
• The infrastructure provider manages and
offers guarantees on availability of the
infrastructure, namely, server machine,
power, network connectivity.

• Enterprises manage themselves, their

applications that are deployed on these server
machines.
Key Contractual Elements of an Infrastructural SLA
ii) Application SLA
• In the application co-location hosting model, the
server capacity is available to the applications
based solely on their resource demands.
• The service providers are flexible in allocating
and de-allocating computing resources among the
co-located applications.

• Therefore, the service providers are also

responsible for ensuring to meet their customer’s
application SLOs.
• The SLA perspective there are multiple challenges
for provisioning the infrastructure on demand.
• These challenges are as follows:
a. The application is a black box to the managed
service provider (MSP) and the MSP has virtually
no knowledge about the application runtime
characteristics.
b. The MSP needs to understand the performance
bottlenecks and the scalability of the application.
c. The MSP analyzes the application before it goes
on-live.
d. If every customer decides to select the highest
grade of SLA simultaneously, there may not be a
sufficient number of servers for provisioning
 [Link] Cycle of SLA
• Each SLA goes through a sequence of steps
starting from identification of terms and
conditions.
• Activation and monitoring of the stated terms
and conditions.
• Eventual termination of contract once the
hosting relationship ceases to exist.
• Such a sequence of steps is called SLA life cycle
and consists of the following five phases:
1. Contract definition
2. Publishing and discovery
3. Negotiation
4. Operationalization
5. De-commissioning
 [Link] Definition: Generally, service
providers define a set of service offerings and
corresponding SLAs using standard
templates.
• These service offerings form a catalog.
• Individual SLAs for enterprises can be derived
by customizing these base SLA templates.

[Link] and Discovery: Service provider

advertises these base service offerings through
standard publication media.
• The customers should be able to locate the
service provider by searching the catalog.
• The customers can search different
competitive offerings and shortlist a few that
fulfill their requirements for further
negotiation.
Phases of SLA life cycle
[Link]: Once the customer has discovered
a service provider who can meet their
application hosting need.
• The SLA terms and conditions needs to be
mutually agreed upon before signing the
agreement for hosting the application.
• For a standard packaged application which is
offered as service, this phase could be
automated.
[Link]: SLA operation consists of
SLA monitoring, SLA accounting, and SLA
enforcement.
SLA monitoring: It involves measuring
parameter values and calculating the metrics
defined as a part of SLA and determining the
deviations.
 SLA accounting: The application’s actual
performance and the performance
guaranteed as a part of SLA is reported.

SLA enforcement: It involves taking

appropriate action when the runtime
monitoring detects a SLA violation.

[Link]-commissioning: SLA decommissioning

involves termination of all activities
performed under a particular SLA.
• When the hosting relationship between the
service provider and the service consumer has
ended.
 [Link] Management in Cloud
• SLA management of applications hosted on
cloud platforms involves five phases.
1. Feasibility
2. On-boarding
3. Pre-production
4. Production
5. Termination

• Different activities performed under each of

these phases are shown in the following flow
chart diagram.

• These activities are explained in detail in the

following subsections.
[Link] Analysis:
• Managed service provider(MSP) conducts
the feasibility study of hosting an application
on their cloud platforms.
• This study involves three kinds of feasibility:
[Link] feasibility
ii. Infrastructure feasibility
iii. Financial feasibility.

i) Technical feasibility
1. Ability of an application to scale out.
2. Compatibility of the application with
the cloud platform being used within the
MSP’s data centre.
 3. The need and availability of a specific
hardware and software required for hosting
and running of the application.

4. Preliminary information about the

application performance and whether they can
be met by the MSP.

ii. Infrastructure feasibility: It involves

determining the availability of
infrastructural resources in sufficient
quantity so that the projected demands of the
application can be met.
[Link] feasibility: The study involves
determining the approximate cost to be
incurred by the MSP and the price the MSP
charges the customer so that the hosting
activity is profitable to both of them.

• A feasibility report consists of the results of

the above three feasibility studies.

2. On-Boarding of Application:
• Once the customer and the MSP agree in
principle to host the application based on the
findings of the feasibility study, the
application is moved from the customer
servers to the hosting platform.
• On-boarding activity consists of the following
steps:
a) Packing of the application for deploying on
physical or virtual environments.
b) The packaged application is executed
directly on the physical servers to capture and
analyze the application performance
characteristics.
c) The application is executed on a virtualized
platform and the application performance
characteristics are noted again.
 d) Based on the measured performance
characteristics, different possible SLAs are
identified.
e) Once the customer agrees to the set of SLOs
and the cost, the MSP starts creating different
policies required by the data center for
automated management of the application.
3. Preproduction:
• Once the determination of policies is completed
as discussed in previous phase, the application
is hosted in a simulated production
environment.
• It facilitates the customer to verify and validate
the MSP’s findings on application’s runtime
characteristics and agree on the defined SLA.
 4. Production:
• In this phase, the application is made
accessible to its end users under the agreed
SLA.
• However, there could be situations when the
managed application tends to behave
differently in a production environment
compared to the preproduction environment.
5. Termination:
• When the customer wishes to withdraw the
hosted application and does not wish to
continue to avail the services of the MSP for
managing the hosting of its application, the
termination activity is initiated.
• On initiation of termination, all data related
to the application are transferred to the
customer and only the essential information is
retained for legal compliance.