A vision for personalized service level agreements in the cloud

Public Clouds today provide a variety of services for data analysis such as Amazon Elastic MapReduce and Google BigQuery. Each service comes with a pricing model and service level agreement (SLA). Today's pricing models and SLAs are described at the level of compute resources (instance-hours or gigabytes processed). They are also different from one service to the next. Both conditions make it difficult for users to select a service, pick a configuration, and predict the actual analysis cost. To address this challenge, we propose a new abstraction, called a Personalized Service Level Agreement, where users are presented with what they can do with their data in terms of query capabilities, guaranteed query performance and fixed hourly prices.