Towards Service Level Management in Clouds

Current Service Level Management solutions for distributed e-Business infrastructures are designed to work in specific domains and are bound to particular languages and protocols. With the transition to Cloud-like environments, it became evident that migrating such solutions from the Grid domain is not a trivial endeavor. Although the various distributed systems concepts may share similar technological foundations, the business and usage models differ significantly. Everything-as-a-Service is replacing the Everything-is-a-Resource paradigm, requiring a different view on Service Level Management. This paper proposes a novel approach that suggests a dynamic solution featuring function-replacement at run-time in order to efficiently and effectively accommodate the different needs and requirements of service providers and consumers. Furthermore, we envisage that the concept of plug-ins for Service Level Management will create a new market for trading pluggable service functionality, most likely provided by SMEs operating in niche markets.