SLA-Driven Governance for RESTful Systems

Sofware distribution models are moving to SaaS paradigms where customers no longer need to buy a perpetual license. In this context, SaaS providers leverage the Service Level Agreement (SLA) concept to delimit the functionality and guarantees to which they commit to their customers. However, although formal specifications for the definition of SLAs have been proposed, providers usually have an ad-hoc approach with a low degree of automation. This approach confirms the fact that the SaaS industry has not incorporated the idea of an SLA model that can be implemented within the infrastructure as a decision mechanism. This instrumentation would be of special interest in RESTful microservice architectures in providing an automated governance framework for the service catalog and regulating the behavior of each component in the context of the agreements reached with each client. This thesis project is divided in four stages: (i) Establishing a sufficiently expressive specification for the description of RESTful microservices regulated by advanced SLAs; (ii) Develop a catalog of SLA analysis and management operations to support the governance of micro-service architectures; (iii) Implement a SLAs management ecosystem to support the government of RESTful microservices; (iv) Consolidation of the Governify platform to validate the proposal in industrial environments.