Client Classification Policies for SLA Negotiation and Allocation in Shared Cloud Datacenters

In Utility Computing business model, the owners of the computing resources negotiate with their potential clients to sell computing power. The terms of the Quality of Service (QoS) to be provided as well as the economic conditions are established in a Service-Level Agreement (SLA). There are situations in which providers must differentiate the SLAs in function of the type of Client that is willing to access the resources or the agreed QoS e.g. when the hardware resources are shared between users of the company that own the resources and external users. This paper proposes to consider the information of potential users when the SLA is under negotiation to allow providers to prioritize users (e.g. internal users over external users, or preferential users over common users). Two policies for negotiation are introduced: price discrimination and client-aware overselling of resources. The validity of the policies is demonstrated through exhaustive experiments.