Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are a the nuts and bolts of a business agreement and next to QoS and Security the final pillar of a Carrier-Grade Cloud offering. SLAs define functional and non-functional conditions under which the service should be delivered. They allow for penalties or compensations to be directly derived.
Ironically these SLAs have historically been best-effort, static (sometimes paper) constructs, taking only the top-level interface into consideration. Service-oriented infrastructures however are built on complex n-tier architectures usually reside (at least in part) under control of external providers.
In practice there is very little the customer can do in order to prove a violation to the provider.
Lack of transparency and SLA monitoring is the biggest hurdle for risk-management departments who need to decide if it’s safe to move a critical part of their business to the cloud, and is amplified even further with Carrier-Grade Cloud platforms.
Best-effort SLAs are a relic from how services and software was sold in the 90ies and has no place in a modern XaaS delivery.
Currently, service providers cannot plan their service landscapes using the SLAs of dependent services. They have no means by which to determine why a certain SLA violation might have occurred, or how to express an associated penalty.
SLA terms are not explicitly related to measurable metrics, nor is their relation to lower-level services clearly defined. As a consequence, service providers cannot determine the necessary (lower-level) monitoring required to ensure top-level SLAs. This missing relationship between top-level SLAs and (lower-level) metrics is a major hurdle to efficient service planning and prediction in service stacks.
The challenge and opportunity for cloud computing businesses is to move beyond best-effort SLAs, and offer services with:
- adjustable (machine-readable) SLAs
- the ability to negotiate tailor-made agreements in an automated fashion
- consistent SLA management across all layers of the technology stack and include the external (Tier-2) stakeholders involved in the delivery
- span across all domains, including Security, QoS, Availability
- integrate into Billing and Customer-Experience-Management (CEM) and tools for measure Quality-of-Experience (QoE)
- transparent monitoring of SLA violations and more intelligent billing
- awareness of self-healing, self-organizing & self-configuring systems
- integrate into systems which affect the provisioning such as configuration management and Life-Cycle systems
As a pioneer in next generation cloud architecture Valbonne Consulting has the bandwidth, knowledge and right experts to provide these features tailored to your requirements.