Engineering Service Level Agreements - A Constrained-domain and Transformation Approach

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are fundamental technical-juridical documents which in their function as contract govern the rights and obligations between service consumers and providers. In today’s growing service ecosystems, individually negotiated SLAs have powerful additional roles such as serving as the input for automated service monitoring and health checking as well as binding service consumers through custom incentives. These advantages, in turn, require adequate engineering techniques to let service providers express the conditions under which a service can be consumed. While many SLA languages and tools exist, existing approaches are either severely limited or too complex to be used by a broad set of providers. Hence, we present a reduced effort approach based on transformations from existing domain-constrained public service descriptions. By demonstrating the application thereof in an Infrastructure-as-a-Service scenario, we show that SLAs can be prepared and improved in a very short time with suitable tools.