Fueled by the growing acceptance of the Web Services Architecture, an emerging trend in application service delivery is to move away from tightly coupled systems towards structures of loosely coupled, dynamically bound systems to support both long and short business relationships. It appears highly likely that the next generation of e-Business systems will consist of an interconnection of servi...

Next Generation Grids aim at attracting commercial users to employ Grid environments for their business critical compute jobs. These customers demand for contractually fixed service quality levels, ensuring the availability of results in time In this context, a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a powerful instrument for defining a comprehensive requirement profile. Numerous research projects wor...

Despite claims in the trade literature that a number of recommended practices have been proved to lead to IT outsourcing success, few of these practices have been subject to disconfirmatory research. Even fewer have been tested statistically to determine whether they generalize to wider populations, or to determine the magnitude of their effect. In this paper, several recommended outsourcing pr...

Fueled by the growing acceptance of the Web Services Architecture, an emerging trend in application service delivery is to move away from tightly coupled systems towards structures of loosely coupled, dynamically bound systems to support both long and short business relationships. It appears highly likely that the next generation of e-Business systems will consist of an interconnection of servi...

On-line service delivery undertaken between clients and service providers often incurs risks for both the client and the provider, especially when such an exchange takes place in the context of an electronic service market. For the client, the risk involves determining whether the requested service will be delivered on time and based on the previously agreed Service Level Agreement (SLA). Often...

Recently, Service Level Agreement (SLA) and green SLA (GSLA) becomes very important for both the service providers/vendors and as well as for the users/customers. There are many ways to inform users/customers about various services with its inherent execution functionalities and even nonfunctional/Quality of Service (QoS) aspects through SLAs. However, these basic SLAs actually do not cover eco...

The main purpose of mutual exclusion in a distributed environment is to control access to a shared resource. Large-scale distributed systems such as clouds or grids provide shared informatics resources to its clients. In this type of environment, Service Level Agreement (SLA) allows for the definition of a type of quality of service (QoS) between a resource provider and a client. This means tha...

SLA (service level agreement) specification languages are designed to express monitorable contracts between a provider and a consumer of a service. It is of interest to determine if one can derive predictive models, e.g., a discreteevent stochastic model, for SLAs expressed in such a language, if possible in automated fashion. For this purpose, we study in this paper the mapping of the Web Serv...

The ability of the servers to deliver services to the clients according to pre-defined agreements is becoming an important requirement. These pre-defined agreements are sometimes referred to as service level agreements (SLA). In most practical cases, these agreements are based on the response times observed by the customer. This service level ‘agreeability’ is not captured in the definitions of...

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are used in different domains and on different levels to establish agreements on Quality of Service (QoS) between a service provider and a customer. SLAs can be based on general agreements like framework agreements. In a grid environment SLA can be technical agreements which deal with properties of services and resources. Research and development in grid computin...