Contribution to Agents-Based Negotiation and Monitoring of Cloud Computing Service Level Agreement
Cloud Computing environments are dynamic and open systems, where cloud providers and consumers frequently join and leave the cloud marketplaces. Due to the increasing number of cloud consumers and providers, it is becoming almost impossible to facilitate face to face meetings to negotiate and establish a Service Level Agreement (SLA); thus automated negotiation is needed to establish SLAs between service providers and consumers with no previous knowledge of each other. In this thesis, I propose, an Automated Cloud Service Level Agreement framework (ACSLA). ACSLA is made up of five stages, and the corresponding software agent components: Gathering, Filtering, Negotiation, SLA Agreement and Monitoring. In the Gathering stage all the information about the providers and what they can offer is gathered. In the Filtering stage the customer’s agent will send the request to ACSLA, which will filter all the providers in order to recommend the best matched candidates. In Negotiation stage the customer’s agent will negotiate separately with each candidate provider using different negotiation algorithms, which will be evaluated and for which recommendations and guidelines will be provided. The output of this stage is that the best outcome from the customer’s perspective will be picked up, which will be the agreed value for each parameter in the SLA. In SLA Agreement stage the provider’s agent and the customer‘s agent will be informed about the Agreement, which will be specified in measurable terms. The output of the SLA Agreement stage will be a list of metrics that can be monitored in the Monitoring stage. Customer’s agent and provider’s agent will also negotiate and agree about the penalties and actions will be taken in case the SLA has been violated and unfulfilled. There is a variety of actions that can be taken, like informing both sides, recommending solutions, self-healing and hot-swapping. ACSLA is evaluated using case studies which show its flexibility and effectiveness. ACSAL offers a novel approach to tackle many challenging issues in the current and likely future, cloud computing market. It is the first complete automated framework for cloud SLA. There are many automated negotiation algorithms and protocols, which have been developed over the years in other research areas; establishing functional solutions applicable to the cloud-computing environment is not an easy task. Rubinstein’s Alternating Offers Protocol, also known as the Rubinstein bargaining model, has been investigated for application in automated cloud SLA, and it offers a satisfactory technical solution for this challenging problem. The purpose of this research was also to apply the state of the art in negotiation automated algorithms/agents within a described Cloud Computing SLA framework, to develop new algorithms, and to evaluate and recommend the most appropriate negotiation approach based on many criteria.
QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
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