An Architecture Design of Life Cycle Based SLA Management

In the Web services environment, appropriate guarantee for the service quality can maximize the ability of web services and ensure the services to be carried out effectively and controllable, and that's what SLA contracts can offer. An SLA(service level agreement) is a contract agreed between a service client and a service provider which defines a series of service quality characters and metrics . In SLA management, the SLA life cycle should be considered carefully because the SLA life cycle is special that includes some issues that out of the service runtime environment, so a common web service management architecture will not meet the SLA management requirements. It is needed to divide the management functions base on the SLA life cycle. Thus, in this paper, the life cycle of SLA is discussed and the SLA-supported Web service architecture and management requirements are also presented. An SLA management platform is designed for SLA definition, service SLA registration and run-time SLA monitoring and controlling mainly base on the SLA life cycle. The paper furthermore shows a model for the mapping from SLA parameters which are advertised by service providers to QoS parameters which are required by service clients.