A Language Support for Cloud Elasticity Management

Elasticity is the intrinsic element that differentiates Cloud computing from traditional computing paradigm, since it allows service providers to rapidly adjust their needs for resources to absorb the demand and hence guarantee a minimum level of Quality of Service (QoS) that respects the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) previously defined with their clients. However, due to non-negligible resource initiation time, network fluctuations or unpredictable workload, it becomes hard to guarantee QoS levels and SLA violations may occur. This paper proposes a language support for Cloud elasticity management that relies on CSLA (Cloud Service Level Agreement). CSLA offers new features such as QoS/functionality degradation and an advanced penalty model that allow providers to finely express contracts so that services self-adaptation capabilities are improved and SLA violations minimized. The approach was evaluated with a real infrastructure and application test bed. Experimental results show that the use of CSLA makes Cloud services capable of absorbing more peaks and oscillations by trading-off the QoS levels and costs due to penalties.