Supporting Temporal Aspects of SLA Establishment in Auto SLAM Framework

Service Level Agreement (SLA) establishment can be viewed as a complex business process in which consumers and providers, with varying and potentially conflicting preferences, interact with one another in order to reach mutually acceptable agreements over the service usage terms and conditions. These interactions are governed by public interaction protocols which define their communicative behaviour and are guided by private decision-making strategies which define their strategic behaviour. Time plays a crucial role in decision-making, necessitating support for modelling temporal constraints in interaction protocol specifications. In this paper, we propose two temporal constraints, namely the deadline constraint and the validity constraint and use the Amazon EC2 Spot Bid Request lifecycle to illustrate the need for supporting them. We extend our previous state based model for SLA interaction protocols [4] to support time sensitive conversations. We have implemented our proposed approach in Auto SLAM [3], a policy-driven framework for automated SLA establishment, and validated it through a real world use case scenario of procuring computing resources from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).