Service level agreement mediation, negotiation and evaluation for cloud services in intercloud environments

The management of today’s service level agreements on the cloud market is often nontransparent and inefficient for the customer and the provider. However, service level agreements are crucial for establishing trust between all participants, especially for companies whose success depends on the purchased cloud service with its appropriated service quality. This thesis aims to improve the current situation on the cloud market in terms of providing architectural, methodological, and functional approaches with standard-based protocol specifications for dynamic and situational service level agreement management. Therefore, this thesis analyses and presents current service level agreement standards and existing implementations. Based on these results, a set of concepts and approaches for agreement and service mediation are developed and experimentally evaluated. However, all of these existing approaches either target a specific community or implement broker services with just a closed product portfolio for services delivered by a small set of providers. In order to establish a trusted provider overlay network as global marketplace for cloud services, where all participants can federate by nature, expose their product offer, and reach a wider customer community, this thesis introduces a novel concept for intercloud agreement mediation. The Agreement-Mediators in this global provider network act as neutral and autonomous entities in the cloud market and rise trust between independent providers and between providers and customers. The language and protocol for searching, negotiating, and establishing service level agreements is specified, developed, and evaluated. The outcomes of this thesis aim to increase efficiency and effectiveness for discovering cloud services of independent providers and the management of service level agreements established for each business relationship. The experimental results show significant improvements in terms of efficiency, scalability, and flexibility.