Managing dynamic services: a contract based approach to a conceptual architecture

This paper describes a novel contract based approach for defining, deploying, monitoring and enforcing service level agreements (SLA) in a dynamic e-business environment. The current trend in application service delivery is to move away from tightly coupled systems towards structures of loosely coupled, dynamically bound systems with long and short business relationships. It appears highly likely that the next generation of e-business systems will consist of an interconnection of services, each provided by a possibly different service provider, that are coupled together to offer an end to end service to a customer. Such an environment, which we call dynamic e-business (DeB), will be governed by dynamically negotiated electronic contracts between service providers and service customers. From a management viewpoint, this development poses new challenges, such as contract based provisioning of management systems, monitoring and violation detection of dynamically agreed upon QoS parameters, problem determination and resolution, according to the terms and conditions specified in the contract. This paper proposes a management architecture for specifying, deploying and monitoring service contracts in a DeB environment, with a view to providing a basis for SLA management.