Practical modeling of the SLA Life Cycle in Cloud Computing

Research in Service level agreements has been of growing interest in the Cloud Computing field. This is due to its pivotal role in solving the trade-off between the benefit of the provider and the interest of the customer. Every SLA has a life cycle and a life time to be managed. The life cycle of SLA consists of several stages that vary according to the SLA. In this paper, we present SLA life cycle in light of the cloud computing domain. The presented SLA life cycle define the sequence of changes of the SLA from the perspective of all parties involved in the contract. Some examples for SLA life cycle are illustrated, in order to show the main phases, structures, processes and entities interactions using UML modeling diagrams. The goal of each phase, the participating actors and their role, the potential dependencies as well as the outcomes of each phase are described in this work.