ysla: Reusable and Configurable SLAs for Large-Scale SLA Management

Despite the pressing need for effective and automated Service Level Agreement (SLA) management in the Cloud computing industry, typical SLA management systems today do not foster re-usability and standardization of SLAs. From a technical perspective, it is difficult to provide reusable building blocks for formal SLAs that are concise and straight-forward to use, yet flexible enough to be re-used in new business engagements without further customization. As a result, extensive manual work is needed for setting up SLAs between business partners, slowing down new business engagements. In this industry paper, we outline novel routes for extending the state of the art in SLA management with regard to cross-client and cross-engagement re-usability in large-scale Cloud environments. Specifically, we present novel formal constructs for cross-engagement SLA templates in combination with engagement-specific classifiers for SLA-related monitoring data. We show a prototypical implementation in an SLA management suite, the ysla language and Engine, and report on the resulting improvements in conciseness and efficiency of SLA modeling by means of a real use-case example from industry.