A Restful Approach to Service Level Agreements for Cloud Environments

Cloud Computing is becoming more and more a commodity service to all kinds of businesses. This leads to a stronger need for dependable service guarantees on the resources or applications offered to the customer by the provider via Service Level Agreements. Most offerings on the market, however, rely on non-electronic modes rather than machine-manageable means. In this paper, we propose a protocol that closes this gap for REST-based services and leverages the benefits of HTTP. We build upon the widely established WS-Agreement document format and show how our protocol integrates with the currently popular Open Cloud Computing Interface.