A testing-based approach to SLA evaluation on cloud environment

Abstract

A service level agreement (SLA) is a negotiated agreement between consumers and service providers in order to guarantee the quality of the negotiated service level. Therefore, many companies used contract to specify the desired service level agreement. SLA may specify the levels of availability, serviceability, performance, operation, security, or other attributes of the service. However, due to the big human efforts to monitor the performance, how to evaluate the SLA in service delivery becomes an important issue. To evaluate SLA automatically, in this paper, we proposed a testing-based SLA evaluation approach based upon the quality model ISO/IEC 25010 that contains eight characteristics: functional, performance, compatibility, usability, reliability, security, maintainability and portability. Nowadays, cloud computing is emerged as a new technology to improve the computational complexity of enterprise information systems. By adopting features of cloud computing, we have implemented a prototype system which integrates open-source software, Jenkins, as controller and other third party softwares as testers to automate SLA evaluation processes according to the testing-based SLA evaluation approach. The experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of our approach and prototype system. The results indicate that our prototype system can provide quality and stable service.