SLO-ML: A Language for Service Level Objective Modelling in Multi-cloud Applications

Cloud modelling languages (CMLs) are designed to assist customers in tackling the diversity of services in the current cloud market. While many CMLs have been proposed in the literature, they lack practical support for automating the selection of services based on the specific service level objectives of a customer's application. We put forward SLO-ML, a novel and generative CML to capture service level requirements. Subsequently, SLO-ML selects the services to honour the customer's requirements and generates the deployment code appropriate to these services. We present the architectural design of SLO-ML and the associated broker that realises the deployment operations. We evaluate SLO-ML using an experimental case study with a group of researchers and developers using a real-world cloud application. We also assess SLO-ML's overheads through empirical scalability tests. We express the promises of SLO-ML in terms of gained productivity and experienced usability, and we highlight its limitations by analysing it as application requirements grow.