SNAP: A Protocol for Negotiation of Service Level Agreements and Coordinated Resource Management in Distributed Systems

A fundamental problem with distributed applications is how to map activities such as computation or data transfer onto a set of resources that will meet the application’s requirement for performance, cost, security, or other quality of service metrics. An application or client must engage in a multi-phase negotiation process with resource managers, as it discovers, reserves, acquires, configures, monitors, and potentially renegotiates resource access. We present a generalized resource management model in which resource interactions are mapped onto a well defined set of symmetric and resource independent service level agreements. We instantiate this model in (the Service Negotiation and Acquisition Protocol (SNAP) which provides integrated support for lifetime management and an at-most-once creation semantics for SLAs. The result is a resource management framework for distributed systems that we believe is more powerful and general than current approaches. We explain how SNAP can be deployed within the context of the Globus Toolkit.