SLA management in federated environments

Increasingly, services such as E-commerce, Web hosting, application hosting, etc., are being deployed over an infrastructure that spans multiple control domains. These end-to-end services require cooperation and internetworking between multiple organizations, systems and entities. Currently, there are no standard mechanisms to share selective management information between the various service providers or between service providers and their customers. Such mechanisms are necessary for end-to-end service management and diagnosis as well as for ensuring the service level obligations between a service provider and its customers or partners. In this paper we describe an architecture that uses contracts based on service level agreements (SLA) to share selective management information across administrative boundaries. We also describe the design of a prototype implementation of this architecture that has been used by us for automatically measuring, monitoring, and verifying service level agreements for Internet services