Towards QoS-Oriented SLA Guarantees for Online Cloud Services

Cloud Computing provides a convenient means of remote on-demand and pay-per-use access to computing resources. However, its ad hoc management of quality-of-service and SLA poses significant challenges to the performance, dependability and costs of online cloud services. The paper precisely addresses this issue and makes a threefold contribution. First, it introduces a new cloud model, the SLAaaS (SLA aware Service) model. SLAaaS enables a systematic integration of QoS levels and SLA into the cloud. It is orthogonal to other cloud models such as SaaS or PaaS, and may apply to any of them. Second, the paper introduces CSLA, a novel language to describe QoS-oriented SLA associated with cloud services. Third, the paper presents a control theoretic approach to provide performance, dependability and cost guarantees for online cloud services, with time-varying workloads. The proposed approach is validated through case studies and extensive experiments with online services hosted in clouds such as Amazon EC2. The case studies illustrate SLA guarantees for various services such as a MapReduce service, a cluster-based multi-tier e-commerce service, and a low-level locking service.