SLA@SOI FI newsletter report

From FutureInternetWiki

A significant milestone on the journey towards the Future Internet has been reached with the recent conclusion of the SLA@SOI research project. Launched in June 2008, this European Commission funded consortium has been researching, developing and proving tools and techniques that can embed SLA-aware infrastructures into the service economy.

With cloud-based services becoming ever more significant, the opportunity for machine-readable SLAs to solve key challenges for both customers and service providers has become ever more obvious. With machine-readable SLAs customers can finally negotiate personalised SLAs, indeed potentially automatically across multiple providers, allowing them pay for precisely what they need rather than the closest offering and support model that the providers can provide. On the provider side, efficiencies previously considered infeasible can now be embraced in confidence as all individual SLAs can be automatically monitored, comprehended and managed.

Announcing the publication of its most recent results, and launching an updated version of its open source framework, the project has delivered an extensive list of results. These include

• Publication of an SLA-enabling architecture suitable for both new and legacy infrastructures
• Definition of a flexible, extensible SLA model for describing arbitrary SLAs
• Development of an open source framework of tools and components to help implement SLA-aware solutions
• Release of an SLA-enabled open reference case to demonstrate the concepts in a retail scenario
• Integration of machine-readable SLAs into four grounded industry use cases covering ERP hosting, Enterprise IT, Service Aggregation and eGovernment scenarios
• Significant progress in several important open standards including OGF's OCCI and WS Agreement, and W3C's USDL

Dr. Wolfgang Theilmann, SAP Research, the project coordinator, found the SLA@SOI project to be "a great experience, seeing how the concept of SLAs allowed us to create a highly harmonized view on the full management lifecycle for SLAs - across really diverse partners with complementary but highly distinct perspectives."

Joe Butler, Intel Labs Europe, Industrial Director of the consortium, noted the "important opportunity to bring together four very diverse application domains, taking a structured approach to the specification and assessment of a novel technology development, namely the SLA framework. The resulting analysis of business impact potential, while proving the benefits of automated SLA-based service management, also provides a substantial reference point in assessing the impact of the SLA framework in other, and more general domains".

Ms. Jessica McCarthy, the Exploitation Manager of the project, explained that "a key differentiator from other current commercial and research offerings was that SLA@SOI looked to provide an SLA-driven approach while explicitly tacking current problems at multiple levels i.e. business, software and infrastructure while also considering the perspective of the entire range of stakeholders."

The relevance of this research has been validated by the extensive interest in the results of the project by industrial partners participating in the project, by independent SMEs engaged in cloud computing, and in the other organisations in Europe and beyond that are looking to build on the results of SLA@SOI in the development of the Future Internet.

Full details of the project including links to the open source contributions, academic publications and demonstration videos can be found at the project website http://www.sla-at-soi.eu.