Enhancing Cloud Capabilities for SLA Enforcement of Cloud Scheduled Applications

Abstract

Cloud computing has become in few years one of the major and important research direction and development area in IT (Information Technology) and Computer Science because of the implication of both technology teams (Engineers, Researchers, etc.) and Business Stakeholders in several and various domains (Health, Communication, Finance and so forth). Lot of IT infrastructure, assets and business processes are in migration road-map from traditional IT to the cloud model taking benefit from this new paradigm advantages to reduce their cost (CAPEX and OPEX), pay-peruse plan and improve QoS (Quality of Service). Workflows are part of a scheduled applications as a day-to-day tasks and operations required by regular business processes that expect to meet a specific QoS from an IT service providers. This assurance should be explicitly written in a SLA (Service Level Agreement) document signed by both parties (Cloud Client and Provider). Fulfillment of the contractual SLA is in the cloud provider responsibility while the cloud Consumer should respect the SLA terms. This guarantee, part of the SLA Management, in a workflow provisioning and execution involves the coordination and cooperation of many services and components, a specific configuration and accurate monitoring data. In this paper, we propose an integrated approach based on the concept of SLA Enforcement for workflow application, as a good example of scheduled applications, by enhancing involved tasks and cloud capability to guarantee the QoS monitoring at provisioning phase. A simple and robust model and algorithm are presented to illustrate the relevance of our approach.