SLAng: a language for defining service level agreements

Application or web services are increasingly being used across organisational boundaries. Moreover, new services are being introduced at the network and storage level. Languages to specify interfaces for such services have been researched and transferred into industrial practice. We investigate end-to-end quality of service (QoS) and highlight that QoS provision has multiple facets and requires complex agreements between network services, storage services and middleware services. We introduce SLAng, a language for defining Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that accommodates these needs. We illustrate how SLAng is used to specify QoS in a case study that uses a web services specification to support the processing of images across multiple domains and we evaluate our language based on it.

[1]  John A. Zinky,et al.  Specifying and measuring quality of service in distributed object systems , 1998, Proceedings First International Symposium on Object-Oriented Real-Time Distributed Computing (ISORC '98).

[2]  Krishnamurthy Srinivasan,et al.  E-Business Process Modeling: The Next Big Step , 2002, Computer.

[3]  Scott Seely,et al.  SOAP: Cross Platform Web Services Development Using XML , 2001 .

[4]  Douglas C. Schmidt,et al.  Integration of QoS-Enabled Distributed Object Computing Middleware for Developing Next-Generation Distributed Application , 2001, LCTES/OM.

[5]  Wolfgang Emmerich,et al.  Model Driven Performance Analysis of Enterprise Information Systems , 2003, TACoS.

[6]  Klara Nahrstedt,et al.  An XML-based Quality of Service Enabling Language for the Web , 2002, J. Vis. Lang. Comput..

[7]  R. J. Gibbens,et al.  An approach to service level agreements for IP networks with differentiated services , 2000, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.

[8]  Mirion Bearman.  ODP-Trader , 1993, Open Distributed Processing.

[9]  Danny Goderis.  Service Level Specification Semantics and Parameters , 2002 .