SLOC: Service Level Objectives for Next Generation Cloud Computing

Since the emergence of cloud computing service level objectives (SLOs) and service level agreements (SLAs) have put themselves forward as one of the key enablers for cloud's on-demand, pay-as-you-go service consumption model. To date, the vast majority of cloud platforms provide support for SLAs only in terms of statically predefined SLOs, e.g., service availability, and low-level resource capacity guarantees, e.g., CPU usage. Unfortunately, there is only limited support to clearly map workload performance requirements to the resource capacity guarantees. In this article, we introduce SLOC- a novel elasticity framework, which promotes a novel performance-driven, SLO-native approach to cloud computing. We outline the main research challenges, vision, and approach of our SLOC framework toward the SLO-native paradigm in next generation cloud computing.