SLA negotiation and enforcement policies for revenue maximization and client classification in cloud providers

In Cloud Computing markets, owners of 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). The common objective of a Cloud provider is tomaximize its economic profit. However, there are situations inwhich providersmust differentiate the SLAs with respect to 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 article proposes two sets of policies to manage SLAs with respect to the business objectives of a Cloud provider: Revenue Maximization or classification of clients. The criterion to classify clients is established according to the relationship between client and provider (external user, internal or another privileged relationship) and the QoS that the client purchases (cheap contracts or extra QoS by paying an extra fee). The validity of the policies is demonstrated through exhaustive experiments. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.