End-to-end SLA management in federated clouds

Cloud federation is a concept that collectively combines segregated cloud services to create an extended pool of resources for clouds to competently deliver their promised level of services. This paper studies the governing aspects of cloud federation through collaborative networking. It proposes a network of federated clouds, CloudLend, that creates a platform for cloud providers to collaborate, and for customers to expand their service selections. We design a service level agreement (SLA) management model to govern and administer the relationships between different cloud services. We define a multi-level SLA specification model to describe QoS terms, in addition to a game theory-based automated SLA negotiation model. We define an adaptive agent-based SLA monitoring model. Formal verification proved that our framework assures customers with maximum optimised QoS guarantees, in addition to supporting cloud providers to make informed resource utilisation decisions. Additionally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our SLA management model.