Towards service level agreements engineering process in cloud computing

Cloud computing becomes the most common product within IT markets and the global business in general. It offers a powerful and flexible resources and services including software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). On the other hand, service level agreement (SLA) is a formal contract between the cloud vendors and providers, and customers including organisations and individuals. SLA is considered as an awkward process for both providers and customers since each part has a different understanding about its detailed structure, phases and embedded elements. In this paper, a fine-defined engineering model with five well-structured phases for managing SLA in a cloud environment is introduced. This SLA engineering model will benefit both cloud providers and consumers. It will allow providers to structure and organise the SLA correctly in attractive way for customers. Simultaneously, it will provide customers with the necessary and sufficient awareness to get a fair SLA for resources or services they may access. Also, a case study is presented to demonstrate how the proposed five phases utilised to construct the required SLA in a private cloud.