Flexible and dynamic SLAs management in Service Oriented Architectures

The increasing adoption of service oriented architectures across different administrative domains forces service providers to use effective mechanisms and strategies of resource management in order to guarantee the quality levels their customers demand during service provisioning. Service level agreements (SLA) are the most common mechanism used to establish agreements on the quality of a service (QoS) between a service provider and a service consumer. However, the proposed solutions have not been taken up by business stakeholders due to the low flexibility and usability together with the lack of interoperability. Any framework for SLA management should address several issues, such as SLA modeling and representation, SLA publication and discovery, protocols for establishing and negotiating SLAs, SLA monitoring and enforcement. This chapter addresses the issues related to the SLA management in service composition scenarios, which impose stronger requirements about flexibility of SLAs, and presents a framework for the management of dynamic SLAs.