SLA-driven distributed application development

The management of Service Level Agreements (SLA) in the development of business processes in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) often requires much manual and errorprone effort by all parties throughout the lifecycle of the processes. The formal specification of SLAs into development tools can simplify some of this effort. In particular, the runtime provisioning and monitoring of processes can be achieved by an autonomic system that adapts to changing conditions to maintain the SLA's goals. A cost model allows the efficient execution and monitoring of processes, based on a declarative, user-specified optimality function. Experiments demonstrate that the system can indeed adapt to changing workload conditions, saving roughly 70% of the network bandwidth in one particular experiment.