SLA-Based Service Selection for Multi-Cloud Environments

Taha, A. and Manzoor, S. and Suri, Neeraj (2017) SLA-Based Service Selection for Multi-Cloud Environments. In: 2017 IEEE International Conference on Edge Computing (EDGE). IEEE, pp. 65-72. ISBN 9781538620168

Abstract

The Multi-Cloud is a new paradigm that facilitates customers to host their applications and data onto multiple Clouds. It also allows the Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) to offer new functionalities in order to satisfy the diverse customer requirements. This is done by offering a combination of services from multiple CSPs that can individually only provide limited functionalities. The issue of 'services selection' using Service Level Agreement's (SLA's) has been well-studied in Cloud computing. However, the Multi-Cloud environment introduces dependencies across the services thus entailing the need of new approaches. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Cloud service selection approach. The novelty of our approach lies in extending and adapting a single Cloud decision-making technique for the Multi-Cloud environment. The proposed framework (i) assesses the service levels provided by varied CSPs and selects the optimal combination of services from multiple CSPs that best satisfy the customer requirements, and (ii) automatically detects conflicts resulting from dependencies between the selected services. Moreover, our framework provides an explanation for the detected conflicts allowing both customers and CSPs to resolve these conflicts. We validate our framework by applying it to real-world data that leverages the standardized Cloud service level agreements structure proposed in the ISO/IEC 19086 standard. © 2017 IEEE.