Benchmarking cloud performance for service level agreement parameters

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Clouds offer capabilities for the high-availability of a wide range of systems, from individual virtual machines to large-scale high performance computing (HPC) systems. But it is argued that the widespread uptake for such systems will only happen if Cloud providers, or brokers, are able to offer bilateral service level agreements (SLAs). In this paper, we discuss how to measure and use quality of service (QoS) information to be able to predict availability, quantify risk, and consider liability in case of failure. We demonstrate through this work that there is a pressing need for such an understanding and explore a set of benchmarks that offers an interesting characterisation of resource performance variability which can be quite significant. We subsequently identify how such information might be used both directly by a user and indirectly via a Cloud Broker in the automatic construction and management of SLAs which reference certain kinds of financial portfolios.