Mapping from Service Level Agreements to Policies
Increasingly, information technology services are being deployed over the Internet and in operating environments that cross multiple autonomous organizations. The interdependence requires participating organizations to share resources and collaborate to enable their computing systems to interact. This requires that operating requirements and performance expectations are specified in a precise and flexible manner, typically through Service Level Agreements (SLA). SLAs are often created and enforced manually. Newer approaches look to use policies as a means of capturing SLAs with the aim of being able to automate the enforcement of SLAs by management systems. A challenge these approaches must address is exactly how to capture SLAs so that policy information can be gathered and how SLAs can be mapped to policies. In this Thesis, we look at how SLAs might be expressed and mapped to policies, which in turn could be used by a management system, such as the emerging autonomie management systems. We consider SLAs expressed in WSLA [60], define an architecture and approach for defining SLAs, and a mapping to policies that can be expressed in PMAC [54], a policy definition language. A description of the implementation of the system is provided along with examples that demonstrate[MABi] its features and usefulness.
Service Level Agreement, Policy, SLA Mapping, Web Services, Automated computing
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