On Service Level Agreement Assurance in Cloud Computing Data Centers

Cloud computing uses internet data centers
to host applications and data storage. Cloud computing
resources and services are offered to customers
on pay-per-use model while the quality of the offered
resources and services are defined using service level
agreements also known as SLAs. Unfortunately, there
is no standard mechanism to verify and assure that
services delivered by the cloud provider satisfy the
SLA agreement in an automatic way. To fill this gap
we propose a framework for SLA assurance, which
can be used by both cloud providers and cloud users.
The proposed framework assesses performance of cloud
applications with and without introducing system and
component failures and then helps to resolve or mitigate
failures to assure the required quality of cloud
applications. The evaluation results obtained through
simulations and using testbed experiments demonstrate
good agreement with the design objectives.