Business-context based SLA parameters for SOA management

With Web services starting to be deployed within organizations and being offered as paid services across organizational boundaries, quality of service (QoS) has become one of the key issues to be addressed by providers and clients. While methods to describe and advertise QoS properties have been developed, the main outstanding issue remains how to implement a service that lives up to promised QoS properties. This paper provides the service level agreement (SLA) parameters for QoS management applied to Web services and raises a set of research issues that originate in the virtualization aspect of services and are specific to QoS management in a services environment - beyond what is addressed so far by work in the areas of distributed systems and performance management.