Cloud Computing Use Cases V4 – Discussion on SLAs

[DCR]

On Feb. 12th, we started a thread for topics to become the basis for
V4 of the Cloud Computing Use Cases White Paper (
http://groups.google.com/group/cloud-computing-use-cases ), which
included:

1) Service Level Agreements
2) Scheduling and Provisioning
3) Asset Management
4) Compliance
5) Moving to the Cloud

We have had some great feedback already, but want to delve into each
of the proposed topics to better understand the needs of the
ecommunity. We will be starting separate threads for each of the above
and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) is the first post:

In order to understand the interest for SLAs, take a look at potential
sub-topics for SLAs and let us know what is missing and which ones are
most important to you:

* SLAs have to be a legally-binding statement of the user's
requirements for security, availability, etc.
* Many SLAs (all of them?) should be written in a machine-readable
format.
* SLAs are tied to metrics. Some of those things are easy to measure
(response time, % availability), while others aren't.
* SLAs will influence (if not define) cloud management. A machine-
readable SLA associated with a VM could tell a cloud vendor where that
VM can be hosted, for example.
* What about Service Level Objectives? Does anyone have experience
with those?

What are your thoughts and experiences on existing standards? Are
there existing standards for metrics?

What other aspects of SLAs are worthy of a whitepaper? As we had with
Security and SLAs in Version 3, there's a fair amount of overlap with
other potential topics. SLAs are obviously tied to security, but
they're also tied to provisioning, scheduling, systems management and
other areas. And anyone moving to the cloud should understand how
important SLAs are and how they work.

In order to consolidate everyone's comments, can you please post to
the Use Cases discussion group at http://su.pr/2IBLBO.

Look forward to your comments.