Fresco: a Web services based framework for configuring extensible SLA management systems

A service level agreement (SLA) is a service contract that includes the evaluation criteria for agreed service quality standards. Since agreeable specifications on the evaluation criteria cannot be limited in practice, competitive SLA management products must be extensible in terms of their support for contract-specific SLA compliance evaluations. While the need of running and managing those software products as services increases, we have found that developing a good solution for configuring them as per contractual terms is a challenging task. This paper presents the Fresco framework, which facilitates configuring extensible SLA management systems using Web services. An XML-based specification of SLA management related data called SCOL will also be presented to show how the framework supports contract-specific SLA terms and contract-specific extensions of the deployed SLA management software. The paper furthermore shows how the Fresco system uses a template-based approach to communicate with other Web services applications with support for various input and output formats. Our experience with implementing the Fresco framework for a leading commercial SLA management software product demonstrates that the framework facilitates the creation of effective and efficient solutions for configuring extensible SLA management systems.