Honoring SLAs on cloud computing services: A control perspective

Abstract

This work contains a short survey of recent results in the literature with a view to opening up new research directions for the problem of honoring SLAs on cloud computing services. This is a new problem that has attracted significant interest recently, due to the urgent need for providers to provide reliable, customized and QoS guaranteed computing dynamic environments for end-users as agreed in contracts on the basis of certain Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Honoring SLAs is a multi-faceted problem that may involve optimal use of the available resources, optimization of the system's performance and availability or maximization of the provider's revenue and it poses a significant challenge for researchers and system administrators due to the volatile, huge and unpredictable Web environments where these computing systems reside. The use of algorithms possessing run-time adaptation features, such as dynamic resource allocation, admission control and optimization becomes an absolute must. As a continuation of the recent successful application of control theory concepts and methods to the computing systems area, our survey indicates that the problem of honoring SLAs on cloud computing services is a new interesting application for control theory and that researchers can benefit significantly from a number of well-known modern control methodologies, such as hybrid, supervisory, hierarchical and model predictive control.