Introduction

24 November 2023 02:23 PM

The Introduction to SLA (Service Level Agreement) Management in the context of cloud computing provides a comprehensive overview of how service providers approach and manage SLAs. Here are the key points
from the document:

1. Early Days of Web-Application Deployment: Initially, the focus was on server provisioning to meet peak load demands of web applications. These applications were hosted on dedicated servers within enterprise-
owned server rooms. The main service-level objectives (SLOs) were response time and throughput of the application end-user requests
The activity of determining the number of servers and their capacity that could satisfactorily serve the application end-user requests at peak loads is called capacity planning

2. Shift to Cloud Computing and SLAs:

- With the growth in the number and complexity of web applications, managing in-house data centers became more challenging and costly.
- Enterprises started outsourcing application hosting to third-party infrastructure providers, leading to the necessity of legal agreements to ensure quality of service (QoS). These agreements are known as SLAs.
- Different types of SLAs emerged, such as infrastructure SLAs and application SLAs, focusing on aspects like server availability, response times, and issue resolution times.

3. Challenges of Dedicated Hosting:

- Dedicated hosting led to underutilization of server capacities, especially during non-peak times.
- To address this, Application Service Providers (ASPs) began co-hosting applications with complementary workload patterns on the same server, leading to more efficient utilization of resources.
- This approach, however, introduced challenges like ensuring performance isolation and security between co-hosted applications.

4. Virtualization and Cloud Platforms:

- Virtualization technologies helped overcome some of the challenges of co-hosting by providing performance isolation and data security for different applications.
- Virtualization led to a shift in resource allocation strategies, moving away from traditional capacity planning to more dynamic, on-demand resource allocation.
- Managed Service Providers (MSPs) emerged, responsible for managing both infrastructure and application availability.
- Cloud platforms introduced new hosting infrastructure, which required a detailed understanding of application behavior for fulfilling SLAs. This necessitated treating customer applications as black boxes due to the
inclusion of third-party components.

Newer challenges such as application performance isolation and security guarantees have emerged and needed to be addressed. Performance isolation implies that one application should not steal the resources
being utilized by other co-located applications.

Virtualization technologies have been proposed to overcome the above challenges. The ASPs could exploit the containerization features of virtualization technologies to provide performance isolation and guarantee
data security to different co-hosted applications [2, 3]. The applications, instead of being hosted on the physical machines, can be encapsulated using virtual machines. These virtual machines are then mapped to the
physical machines. System resource allocation to these virtual machines can be made in two modes: (1) conserving and (2) nonconserving.
- In the conserving mode, a virtual machine demanding more system resources (CPU and memory) than the specified quota cannot be allocated the spare resources that are remain un-utilized by the other co-
hosted virtual machines.
- In the nonconserving mode the spare resources that are not utilized by the co -hosted virtual machines can be used by the virtual machine needing the extra amount of resource. If the resource requirements of
a virtual machine cannot be fulfilled from the current physical host, then the virtual machine can be migrated to another phy sical machine capable of fulfilling the additional resource requirements.

5. Traditional Approaches to SLO Management:

- The document discusses traditional techniques like load balancing and admission control mechanisms used to manage SLOs and ensure QoS for hosted web applications.

In summary, the Introduction to SLA Management outlines the evolution from traditional web application hosting to modern cloud computing paradigms, emphasizing the role of SLAs in ensuring service quality and
efficiency. It highlights the challenges and solutions encountered in this transition, including the adoption of virtualization and the emergence of MSPs.

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TRADITIONAL APPROACHES TO SLO MANAGEMENT
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1. Overview of Traditional SLO Management

Traditional methods primarily relied on load balancing techniques and admission control mechanisms to ensure guaranteed quality of service (QoS) for hosted web applications.
These mechanisms were seen as the first attempts towards managing SLOs.

2. Load Balancing
Objective: To distribute incoming requests across a set of physical machines, each hosting an application replica, to evenly spread the load.
Process:
The load balancing algorithm operates on a front-end node (physical machine) that interfaces with clients, receives incoming requests, and then distributes these requests to different physical machines
(back-end nodes) for execution.
Categories of Load Balancing Algorithms:
- Class-agnostic: This type doesn't consider the nature of the request or the type of client.
- Class-aware: This type inspects the type of client making the request and/or the type of service requested before deciding which back-end node should service the request.

3. Admission Control
Role: Plays a crucial role in deciding which requests should be admitted into the application server, especially during heavy loads.
Objective: To select a subset of incoming requests that ensures high overall pay-off during overload situations.
Types of Admission Control Mechanisms:
- Request-based Algorithms: Reject new requests if servers are at capacity, possibly impacting multi-request client sessions.
- Session-based Algorithms: Focus on completing longer sessions; new sessions might be rejected.
QoS-aware Control Mechanisms: These depend on the user type or the nature of the request, prioritizing high-priority users or less resource-intensive requests during overload.

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Types of SLA
24 November 2023 02:43 PM

The section on "Types of SLA" in the provided document outlines two primary types of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in the context of application hosting. Here is a detailed explanation of these types:

Infrastructure SLA:

Definition and Scope: Infrastructure SLA focuses on the guarantees provided by the infrastructure provider regarding the availability of the infrastructure. This includes server machine power, network connectivity, and similar aspects.
Application Management: In this model, enterprises manage their applications that are deployed on server machines. The machines are leased to the customers and are isolated from machines of other customers.
Service-Level Guarantees: A practical example of service-level guarantees offered by infrastructure providers includes hardware availability, power availability, data center network availability, backbone network availability, service credit for
unavailability, outage notification guarantee, internet latency guarantee, and packet loss guarantee. Specific metrics like 99% uptime in a calendar month for hardware availability or 99.999% of the time in a calendar month for backbone
network availability are often used to quantify these guarantees.
Key Contractual Elements: The document provides a table (Table 16.2) that lists these key contractual elements, including the specific standards or benchmarks for each.

Application SLA:

Definition and Scope: Application SLA pertains to the application co-location hosting model where server capacity is allocated based on the resource demands of the applications.
Resource Allocation: Service providers in this model are flexible in allocating and de-allocating computing resources among co-located applications.
Service Provider's Responsibility: Service providers are responsible for meeting the customer's application Service Level Objectives (SLOs).
Examples of Service-Level Objectives: This might include web site response time, latency of the web server, and latency of the database. For instance, an SLO might state a maximum website response time of 3.5 seconds per user request.
Penalties for SLA Breach: There can be stipulations for penalties in case of SLA breaches, such as a financial penalty for every minute the SLO is breached.
Flexibility and Customization: Customers and service providers can mutually agree upon a set of SLAs with different performance and cost structures. Customers have the flexibility to choose from these agreed SLAs and can switch between
different SLAs at runtime.

From the SLA perspective there are multiple challenges for provisioning the infrastructure on demand. These challenges are as follows:

a. The application is a black box to the MSP and the MSP has virtually no
knowledge about the application runtime characteristics. Therefore, the
MSP needs to determine the right amount of computing resources
required for different components of an application at various
workloads.

b. The MSP needs to understand the performance bottlenecks and the

scalability of the application.

c. The MSP analyzes the application before it goes on-live. However,

subsequent operations/enhancements by the customer’s to their applications
or auto updates beside others can impact the performance of the
applications, thereby making the application SLA at risk.

d. The risk of capacity planning is with the service provider instead of the
customer. If every customer decides to select the highest grade of SLA
simultaneously, there may not be a sufficient number of servers for
provisioning and meeting the SLA obligations of all the customers.

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Life Cycle
24 November 2023 02:57 PM

Each SLA goes through a sequence of steps starting from identification of

terms and conditions, activation and monitoring of the stated terms and
conditions, and eventual termination of contract once the hosting relationship
ceases to exist.

Such a sequence of steps is called SLA life cycle and consists of

the following five phases:
1. Contract definition
2. Publishing and discovery
3. Negotiation
4. Operationalization
5. De-commissioning

Contract Definition:
- Service providers use standard templates to define service offerings and corresponding SLAs.
- These offerings form a service catalog.
- Individual SLAs for enterprises are created by customizing these base SLA templates.

Publication and Discovery:

- Service providers advertise their base service offerings through standard publication media.
- Customers locate service providers by searching the catalog.
- This phase enables customers to explore various competitive offerings, shortlisting those that meet their requirements for further negotiation.

Negotiation:
- After a customer identifies a suitable service provider, the SLA terms and conditions are mutually agreed upon.
- This agreement is essential before finalizing the hosting arrangement.
- For standard packaged applications offered as a service, this process might be automated.
- For customized applications on cloud platforms, this is a manual process.
- Service providers analyze the application's scalability and performance before finalizing the SLA.
- The end of this phase sees the SLA being mutually agreed and signed off.
- SLA negotiation may involve the WS-negotiation specification.

Operationalization:
- This phase includes SLA monitoring, accounting, and enforcement.
- Monitoring:
SLA monitoring involves measuring parameter values and calculating the metrics defined as a part of SLA and determining the deviations. On identifying the
deviations, the concerned parties are notified. SLA accounting involves capturing and archiving the SLA adherence for compliance.
- Accounting:
As part of accounting, the application’s actual performance and the performance guaranteed as a part of SLA is reported. Apart from the frequency and the duration
of the SLA breach, it should also provide the penalties paid for each SLA violation.
- Enforcement:
SLA enforcement involves taking appropriate action when the runtime monitoring detects a SLA violation. Such actions could be notifying the concerned parties,
charging the penalties besides other things. The different policies can be expressed using a subset of the Common Information Model (CIM). The CIM model is an open
standard that allows expressing managed elements of data center via relationships and common objects.
- De-commissioning:
- This phase is about terminating all activities under an SLA when the hosting relationship ends.
- The SLA outlines terms and conditions for contract termination and specifies situations for legally ending the service provider-consumer relationship.

Decommisioning:
- involves termination of all activities performed under a particular SLA when the hosting relationship between the service provider and the service consumer has
ended.
- SLA specifies the terms and conditions of contract termination and specifies situations under which the relationship between a service provider and a service
consumer can be considered to be legally ended.

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SLA MANAGEMENT IN CLOUD
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