New service opportunities for consumers and providers

Growth in the service economy has highlighted key challenges in IT-supported service provisioning, particularly the need for formal service level agreements. Wolfgang Theilmann and John Kennedy of the SLA@SOI project outline how their work in this area will allow services to be traded in a flexible and dependable way..

Knowledge and technical expertise are increasingly important commodities in the European economy, part of a move away from heavy industry towards an increased focus on services, particularly those that improve productivity and performance. This is a trend which demands a new approach to IT-supported service provisioning, according to Wolfgang Theilmann, the overall coordinator of the SLA@SOI project. “Our vision is to drive the European economy towards an environment where services can be dependably traded. This can be achieved through service level agreements (SLA’s),” he says. Formal contracts that specify the characteristics, quality parameters, and non-functional properties of a service – like price, performance and availability – SLA’s are being developed out of a recognition of the shortcomings of existing approaches to service provisioning. “At the moment consumers pay for a service and pray that it is of good quality and does not impede them in their business activities. That’s one of the reasons why cloud-like IT services and other similar examples are not yet used for business-critical activities – the risk is simply too high,” explains Theilmann. “We aim to deliver an SLA management framework that supports the complete service lifecycle, from service offering specification and service negotiation right through – if service delivery has been agreed – to service monitoring."

Supporting service providers

It is the details around a service or product that define its value, such as the maximum speed of a car, or its overall fuel economy. The IT industry is not yet as mature as the automotive industry; nevertheless Theilmann believes the key details of a service can and should be specified through SLA’s. “We aim to provide the means to specify SLA’s, but the most important part of our work is enabling providers to understand their own capabilities. Providers will only know what kinds of SLA terms they can subscribe to, what they can offer, what they can agree to, and at what price, if they understand the capabilities of their own service stack – in particular their IT stack,” he acknowledges. Theilmann’s colleague John Kennedy – another key figure within SLA@SOI – believes it is possible to reflect the rapidly changing nature of the IT industry within an SLA. “SLA’s are particularly relevant to cloud computing, an increasingly important and relevant deployment model for businesses seeking to consume computer services, be they infrastructure as a service, platform as a service or software as a service,” he points out. “These services can all be described by service providers through formal template SLA’s. Once these template SLA’s are machine readable, you can start doing very interesting things with these services – for example, automatic negotiation of personalised SLA’s becomes a possibility.”

This opens up new opportunities in terms of the automation and flexibility of services for both consumers and providers, important considerations given the size and highly complex structure of IT stacks. IT stacks are comprised of a hierarchy of services, each of which relies upon the surrounding layers, making multi-layer service and SLA management central to understanding its performance. “If you really want to understand the non-functional properties of a certain service you have to dive into IT stacks and the service hierarchy. For example, if you want to look at the performance of higher level services then you also have to understand the performance of the underlying lower level services,” stresses Theilmann. Understanding the relationship between the various elements of the IT stack leads to an improved understanding of the balance between issues like reliability, security and throughput, and in turn enhances transparency for the provider. “Realising our vision of SLA’s and SOI’s (Service Oriented Infrastructures) includes not just developing SLA’s that describe the services being offered by the service provider, but also providing ongoing, comprehensive, reliable monitoring at run-time to ensure SLA’s are being delivered,” says Kennedy. “This will expose – at run-time – various details and metrics, so consumers can monitor the performance of the service provider and ensure the service they are paying for is being delivered.”

Use cases

These are important considerations for end-users, who while aware of the potential of SOI’s, will only adopt them if they are both reliable and effective. The project consortium includes both academic and commercial partners, and their software is being deployed and evaluated in four separate use cases. “We have one use case from the telecommunications domain. They eventually want to address private consumers, but the service provider wants to make sure that the quality of the service they are delivering to the private consumers can be guaranteed. In this case the eventual SLA agreement is not made towards the private customer but between commercial organisations. The end goal is still to deliver quality to private customers,” says Theilmann. Based himself at Intel, Kennedy is involved in an internally-based use case. “We have a use case where we are deploying SLA’s inside our own data centres. We want to assess the benefits of exposing our infrastructure, via SLA’s, to our internal customers,” he outlines. “We’ve got enormous data computing demands inside Intel. If we offer our data centre infrastructure via SLA’s to our various internal customers and departments then we can provide a great deal of flexibility to business management, data centre management, service providers and the departments that are using this infrastructure. This brings new flexibilities and new efficiencies. We aim to explore this further.”

This work will have a significant impact on the IT departments of participating organisations, particularly in terms of the way they use, manage and control their IT services. It is important to separate the roles of service providers and service consumers in this regard. “Service providers basically get management support to create their service offers, negotiate deals and monitor the running infrastructure, and they can do it in a multi-layered way across their complete stack. They will see the complete hierarchy – how the various elements relate to each other and how a top-level service offer translates down to lower-level service offers,” says Theilmann. This support will reduce the amount of manual work through increased automation and formalisation; however, the picture is different for service consumers. “They get much more support when they want to outsource IT capabilities. This support comes in the form of formalised contracts through these SLA’s, and if the provider really delivers on their promises then they can compare different offers and monitor the running services,” continues Theilmann. “Service consumers need much less technical expertise than previously, because the SLA basically standardises and formalises their contract with the provider, and also supports the automated monitoring.”

This work is part of the wider NESSI (Networked European Software and Services Initiative) open framework, which aims to develop a new way to combine software and services to drive the European economy. SLA@SOI is one of the core pillars of NESSI, reinforcing its wider strategic importance, and the potential for further development. “The NESSI initiative has created a much larger reference architecture, which we contribute to. This addresses cloud computing topics, as well as new mash-up and security topics. We are also seeing adoption in other areas –a couple of advanced networking projects are keen to adopt our approach and use it to address networking problems,” says Theilmann. There is a real need to establish and promote standards in this area, something which forms a key part of the project’s future plans. “We are keen to collaborate with external projects and are actively engaged in various standards groups, for example we are playing a leading role in driving the OGF Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) standard,” says Kennedy. “We need a standard interface into the virtual machines that cloud computing offers, so we’ve been working to develop an industry standard in OCCI. We’ve also been working on Web Service Agreement (WSAG) and WSAG Negotiaton standards. Indeed we’re very interested in exploring any opportunity to help promote and support dependable SLA’s in the SOI’s of the future.”

Wolfgang Theilmann is senior researcher within SAP Research. His is responsible for the research cluster Business Grids where he works on topics such as service science, cloud computing, system modelling and performance prediction. Wolfgang studied computer science at the University of Karlsruhe and made his PhD at the University of Stuttgart.

For futher information on the project; please email wolfgang.theilmann@sap.com or john.m.kennedy@intel.com. Alternatively, visit the website; http://www.sla-at-soi.eu

Published: Monday, 9th August 2010 by Adelle Kehoe