Autonomous Quality of Service Management in Virtual

Organisations

Bastian Koller, Lutz Schubert

High Performance Computing Centre of
Stuttgart, Germany

Workshop 5a, 20 October 2005 eChallenges e-2005 Copyright 2005 University of Stuttgart, HLRS
 Motivation, problem area

• Virtual Organization (VO) as extended model of outsourcing

of tasks to service providers
– Interaction through web-services
– Alliance of independent organisations that share resources in order
to enact a common business process
– “VO Manager” as central instance managing the interactions
• Problem: lack of “observability” of such business partners
 high risk of failure
• Reality:
– Written legal contracts
• Specification of the exact terms of the service
• All participants have to sign
• Losses in case of failures of partners are compensated by fixing
penalties for contract breaches

Workshop 5a, 20 October 2005 eChallenges e-2005 Copyright 2005 University of Stuttgart, HLRS
 Research Objectives

Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

• electronic form of written contracts
• define the quality that a service has to maintain
• enable autonomous observation and maintenance of a service’s
behaviour
BUT: SLAs or related forms of electronic contracts are generally not
accepted as legally binding in the current form of jurisdiction
 need for additional precautions to enable the legal impact of such forms
of contracts
• Current Research activities:
– TrustCoM with respect to legal issues
– NextGRID

Workshop 5a, 20 October 2005 eChallenges e-2005 Copyright 2005 University of Stuttgart, HLRS
 Research approach, Methodology

• Analysis of a business case scenario with respect to:

– usage of SLAs in the context of typical business

– limitations of SLAs in the context of typical business

• Depiction of a framework providing the respective

functionalities

Workshop 5a, 20 October 2005 eChallenges e-2005 Copyright 2005 University of Stuttgart, HLRS
 Business Use-Case

• Aircraft manufacturer wants to design an airplane

• Different design- and analysis teams are required for meeting the
customer´s needs

• Need for
– Identification of collaboration partners
– Negotiation to reach the best conditions for either side
– Monitoring of the performance of the service providers
– Management of the collaboration
– Billing for calculating the actual „fair“ price

Workshop 5a, 20 October 2005 eChallenges e-2005 Copyright 2005 University of Stuttgart, HLRS
 Use-Case Overview

Workshop 5a, 20 October 2005 eChallenges e-2005 Copyright 2005 University of Stuttgart, HLRS
 SLAs in Virtual Organisations

• Identification
– Customer can query whether the service provider is of interest or
not (on basis of published SLA templates)

• Negotiation
– Negotiation of the individual parameters of SLA Template
• E.g. 10 GB storage for 20 € per month  90 € for 100 GB
storage
– Signing process after reached agreement
– Maintenance of SLA copy for later reference

Workshop 5a, 20 October 2005 eChallenges e-2005 Copyright 2005 University of Stuttgart, HLRS
 SLAs in Virtual Organisations

• Monitoring
– SLA document specifies (system) parameters for electronical
supervision
– Usage of tools like WMI or Ganglia to monitor usual parameters
• 10 CPUs with each 5 GHz are always available
– SLAs allow covering more complex terms  Respective data
provision is needed to enable autonomous management
– Comparison of provided values with the agreed SLA
– Identification of contract breaches and notification of customer and
service provider to take actions

Workshop 5a, 20 October 2005 eChallenges e-2005 Copyright 2005 University of Stuttgart, HLRS
 SLAs in Virtual Organisations

• Management
– SLAs may define what actions have to be performed in case of a
contract breach
• Worst-case (provider)  replacement
– Advantage: possibility of violation-prevention on
the service providers side

• Billing
– Information provided by SLA may be used for billing purposes
– Two possibilities:
• Storing it in a log for later calculation
• Immediate Charging

Workshop 5a, 20 October 2005 eChallenges e-2005 Copyright 2005 University of Stuttgart, HLRS
 Towards a SLA Management framework

• VO-Manager
• Notary
• Log
• Negotiator
• Monitor
• Evaluator
• Monitoring Interface
• SLA Parser
• Data Provider
• SLA Templates

Workshop 5a, 20 October 2005 eChallenges e-2005 Copyright 2005 University of Stuttgart, HLRS
 Our framework design

Workshop 5a, 20 October 2005 eChallenges e-2005 Copyright 2005 University of Stuttgart, HLRS
 Summary

SLA-Management allows for:

• Identification of interaction partners on basis of QoS
statements (VO)
• Negotiation of parameters to be enacted
• Quality of Service maintenance in an autonomous (web-
based) environment
• Self-management & self-healing of services
• Competition: offering QoS managed services to customers

Workshop 5a, 20 October 2005 eChallenges e-2005 Copyright 2005 University of Stuttgart, HLRS
 Conclusion and outlook

• Service Level Agreements are still a research issue

• Existing technologies don’t provide all the means required
to allow for autonomous management
• Our Architecture is only a first approach for enacting all
issues related to autonomous SLA management, given the
right language
• Standards like WS-Agreement and WSLA are good in their
areas but a fusion of the two would provide the best results
• Currently addressed by the IST-projects TrustCoM
(http://www.eu-trustcom.com) and NextGrid
(http://www.nextgrid.org).

Workshop 5a, 20 October 2005 eChallenges e-2005 Copyright 2005 University of Stuttgart, HLRS
 THANK YOU!

Workshop 5a, 20 October 2005 eChallenges e-2005 Copyright 2005 University of Stuttgart, HLRS