Conceptual SLA framework for cloud computing

Cloud computing has been a hot topic in the research community since 2007. In cloud computing, the online services are conducted to be pay-as-you-use. Service customers need not be in a long term contract with service providers. Service level agreements (SLAs) are agreements signed between a service provider and another party such as a service consumer, broker agent, or monitoring agent. Because cloud computing is a recent technology providing many services for critical business applications, reliable and flexible mechanisms to manage online contracts are very important. This paper presents the main criteria which should be considered at the stage of designing the SLA in cloud computing. Also, we investigate the negotiation strategies between cloud provider and cloud consumer and propose our method to maintain the trust and reliability between each of the parties involved in the negotiation process.