ASLAMaaS

Autonomic SLA Management as a Service (ASLAMaas) is a project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) that deals with the independent and automated management of service level agreements in cloud environments. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) describe the guaranteed quality of services (QoS) that is negotiated between the customer and the service provider. Unfortunately, the general practice of SLA management is not suitable for cloud computing as it does not take into account the dynamics and variability.

Autonomic SLA Management as a Service (ASLAMaaS) is intended to enable cloud users to adapt their "outsourced" cloud services to changes in their business processes at any time and to adjust the corresponding SLAs. One of the main objectives of the project is to use, combine and adapt existing technologies in order to create a standardized, adaptable and easy-to-use SLA management system.

To this end, the following main topics are being investigated:

• Creation of a framework SLA document for cloud infrastructures.
• Design and specification of new cloud-specific SLAs, pricing and business models and typical use cases.
• Definition of an interface to the cloud management infrastructure and to the customer's IT management infrastructure, e.g. an interface to ITIL management processes such as SLA management, asset management.
• Design of autonomous SLA management as a service and prototype implementation
• In addition, new cloud-specific SLAs, such as service scaling, service reservation, service peak utilization, etc. should be enabled and monitored.

The service will be used by the cloud customer and the cloud provider to manage and monitor the service quality defined in the SLAs and will be integrated into the IT management infrastructure of the customer and the cloud provider. Based on the MAPE-K concept, ASLAMaaS can automatically counteract SLA violations with the help of policies and predefined action plans, e.g. by providing additional resources. These cloud-specific mechanisms and techniques are to be investigated with the aim of better maintaining and guaranteeing QoS within a certain framework. Dynamic SLA management with ASLAMaaS is intended to reduce IT costs, better manage SLA violations and increase the security of cloud services. It also increases trust and acceptance of cloud computing environments.