On the automated analysis of WS–Agreement documents: Applications to the processes of creating and monitoring agreements

Abstract

Abstract. The need for Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to supervise the consumption of services is increasing in business applications and Cloud scenarios due to the penalties that can apply for violation of SLA terms. Such a need for SLAs boosts the importance and complexity of SLA lifecycle supporting systems (SLA-driven solutions). In our work we propose to improve the current support to develop SLA-driven solutions by enhancing both, the SLA specifications and automated analysis techniques. Furthermore, we have applied our proposal to creating and monitoring agreement solutions.

iAgree Studio: A Platform to Edit and Validate WS–Agreement Documents

“…In particular, it supports the kinds of conflicts between terms and creation constraints presented in [3,4], and the non-compliance situations between templates and agreement offers exposed in [2]. …”

“…Document validation. iAgree studio is able to validate iAgree documents by checking that they do not contain semantic errors, supporting the kinds of conflicts between terms and creation constraints presented in [3,4], and the non-compliance situations between templates and agreement offers exposed in [2]. Depending on the kind of document, the validation comprise different properties.…”

“…0 5 * S t o r a g e S i z e ; o n l y I f RRS = t r u e ; C2 : S t o r a g e P r i c e = 0 . 1 2 * S t o r a g e S i z e ; o n l y I f RRS = f a l s e ; C3 : S t o r a g e S i z e <= 5000 TB ; C4 : T o t a l P r i c e = S t o r a g e P r i c e + S u p p o r t P l a n P r i c e ; o n l y I f ( F i r s t P r o j e c t = f a l s e o r S t o r a g e S i z e > 5 ) ; iAgree [4] is a fully-fledged WS-Agreement-compliant language that completes the WS-Agreement schema with a set of languages to describe all WS-Agreement elements. Figure 1 shows an iAgree template inspired in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (AmazonS3) including: terms to describe the service (see service AWS-S3, and Monitorable Properties) and guarantees (see G1-G5), terms compositors to combine the terms (see G5), and creation constraints (see C1-C4).…”

“…Moreover, iAgree supports expressive arithmetic-logic expressions within the service level objectives (SLOs) (see G2), qualifying conditions (QCs) of conditional terms (see G3-G4), and creation constraints (CCs) (see C2). In addition, an advantage of iAgree is that its validity criteria has been extensively researched [2,3,4] and algorithms for checking and explaining the validity of iAgree documents have also been developed.…”

“…iAgree studio supports to edit and validate WSAgreement documents with expressive terms including arithmetic-logic expressions relating several service properties inside the SLOs, QCs, and CCs, and supporting terms compositors defining agreement variants inside an agreement. Other WS-Agreement-based solutions studied in [4] do not support these agreement elements that are in the specification limiting their usefulness in real scenarios in which many of these elements are commonly used. Document validation.…”