Talk:DistOS-2011W Observability & Contracts

Observability

• How do we define 'public' action? How do we monitor 'public' action without monitoring every action?
• How can you make sure your agent is acting according to your instructions?
• How can we ensure that information we receive through a third-party is legitimate?

Contracts

• What can or can't be contracted?
• How can you quantify abstract resources?
• How can two or more parties agree with a minimum of intervention?

Some forms of contracts exist in the form of Service Level Agreements, and there have been efforts made to automate this process:

AURIC

AURIC: A Scalable and Highly Reusable SLA Compliance Auditing Framework from Lecture Notes in Computer Science, by Hasan and Burkhard Stiller, 2007.

Abstract

Service Level Agreements (SLA) are needed to allow business interactions to rely on Internet services. Service Level Objectives (SLO) specify the committed performance level of a service. Thus, SLA compliance auditing aims at verifying these commitments. Since SLOs for various application services and end-to-end performance definitions vary largely, automated auditing of SLA compliances poses the challenge to an auditing framework. Moreover, end-to-end performance data are potentially large for a provider with many customers. Therefore, this paper presents a scalable and highly reusable auditing framework and a prototype, termed AURIC (Auditing Framework for Internet Services), whose components can be distributed across different domains.

Bandwidth

SLA-Driven Flexible Bandwidth Reservation Negotiation Schemes for QoS Aware IP Networks from Lecture Notes in Computer Science by Gerard Parr and Alan Marshall, 2004.

Abstract

We present a generic Service Level Agreement (SLA)-driven service provisioning architecture, which enables dynamic and flexible bandwidth reservation schemes on a per- user or a per-application basis. Various session level SLA negotiation schemes involving bandwidth allocation, service start time and service duration parameters are introduced and analysed. The results show that these negotiation schemes can be utilised for the benefits of both end user and network provide such as getting the highest individual SLA optimisation in terms of Quality of Service (QoS) and price. A prototype based on an industrial agent platform has also been built to demonstrate the negotiation scenario and this is presented and discussed.

Dynamic Adaptation

Context-Driven Autonomic Adaptation of SLA from Lecture notes in Computer Science, by authors Caroline Herssens, Stéphane Faulkner and Ivan Jureta, 2008.

Abstract

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are used in Service-Oriented Computing to define the obligations of the parties involved in a transaction. SLAs define the service users’ Quality of Service (QoS) requirements that the service provider should satisfy. Requirements defined once may not be satisfiable when the context of the web services changes (e.g., when requirements or resource availability changes). Changes in the context can make SLAs obsolete, making SLA revision necessary. We propose a method to autonomously monitor the services’ context, and adapt SLAs to avoid obsolescence thereof.