‘Inter Cloud SLA Broker’ is a term assigned to Sensible Cloud’s sense^TM platform by an industry analyst.

The term refers to sense’s core mission to define, implement and to automatically apply cloud service management within and across mixed cloud services through the use of formalised business SLAs.  This encompasses SLA management across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS cloud deployment models from all three cloud distributions; private, public and hybrid clouds.

Each type of service and each of the service’s policies are described by a collection of one or more SLAs.  sense continuously monitors service health compared to the declared KPIs and thresholds of the SLAs.   Upon crossing a KPI threshold which declares some level of stress or SLA violation, automatic notification, adjustment, and provisioning actions are triggered to bring the service back into line with its SLA guides.  This could involve provisioning additional IaaS resources from another provider to support unplanned load, redirect VIP requests to the most performant service provider endpoint (even perhaps at the costs of impeding other non-VIP requests), or to operate a financial costs analysis across cloud service marketplaces to broker the best price for an available cloud service at that time.

The key goal of sense as an inter cloud SLA broker is to provide cloud service management and real-time control and agility to ensure that cloud IT services are always applied in the right way, with the right amount at the right time to ensure the business services they support achieve their defined targets.

The role of the inter cloud SLA broker is to align cloud IT resources with user declared business goals.

In the same model as IaaS and PaaS, SLA-as-a-Service or SLAaaS implies the delivery of a business related IT service to provide cloud service SLA management using a software-as-a service delivery model.

Sensible Cloud introduces ControlMyCloud.com

Sensible Cloud is the first company to provide a solution to actively manage service levels between cloud service consumers and providers as an ‘over the internet delivered service’.  There is no need to install software in the data center or require your cloud provider to install software.  controlmycloud.com from Sensible Cloud will allow you to access your own set of SLA templates for specific markets, to customize the SLA templates to fit your specific business needs, and to attach these SLAs to your existing _IaaS, PaaS, SaaS engagements.  SLAaaS is used to raise the level of transparency, control and reliability of cloud services.

To sign-up and for more information go to controlmycloud.com

An SLA broker mediates between the consumer and provider parties by establishing the appropriate grade and implementation of service levels for the agreed business service.

Business and IT organizations are more familiar to SLA brokering, in regard to the contractual services provided to external customers, partners and suppliers.  Who or what “brokers” the service levels between these business users and IT, within the enterprise?

Sensible Cloud has developed sense^TM, from the ground up, to be a service oriented software solution to bridge this gap.  Enabling business service levels to be expressed within service level agreements (SLA), that are defined and implemented into existing and future IT services that support business applications.  sense provides a complete set of SLA authoring and monitoring, along with the critical ability of automated adjustment capabilities to ensure that business applications run at near optimum performance within the guides stated within the SLAs .    Always delivering better than a defined level of performance while minimizing the IT services and costs to achieve the agreed service level.

This is extremely valuable today, in managing SLAs from, between and across cloud service providers. If you are considering private, public or hybrid cloud service in a IaaS , PaaS , SaaS model, sense was designed to be a service broker across all these distributions and deployment models. sense is an inter cloud SLA broker

SLA@SOI is a European Union funded research project looking to formalize the definition and lifecycle of Service Level Agreements (SLA) as they pertain to supporting a service oriented economy.

The goal of the project is to provide a formalized and standard approach for all service economy participants to the argument of service level.  This will cover the full lifecycle of services and SLAs from definition and negotiation through to monitoring, guarantees, and penalties.

sense adopts and extends SLA@SOI principles to also effect automated actions to ensure SLA managed service run at near-optimum efficiency as described by their service level requirements

Like its ancestors; “what is client-server?” and “what is SOA?”, questions like “what is cloud computing?” are attracting a near infinite number of viewpoints from technology based marketing, analysts, discussions and blogs.  Here we’ll try to put a clear and simple label (with pictures) on cloud computing.  Feel free to join the debate with your comments below.

Cloud computing is the evolution and convergence of a number of mature and fast maturing technology market threads; virtualization, utility computing and software as a service (SaaS).  Cloud computing already extends beyond the sum of these three to represent the core of what is fast becoming the most disruptive computing model of the 2010′s.

• Virtualization – abstracts from the underlying hardware technology and provides a complete software interface to interact and manage all aspects of physical hardware representation.
• Utility computing – provides access to computing resources on a pay-as-you-go model essentially offers the ability to build and utilize computing infrastructure without investing in computing hardware (similar to utility companies that produce, distribute and sell electricity).
• SaaS – deliver business application functionally over the web at a subscription rate without the need to buy and install software licenses

Cloud computing principles merge these concepts to provide transparent access to required computing software and hardware services typically offered via some form of “pay-as-you-go” model.  While there are numerous technical and commercial representations of cloud offerings on the market, the following principles should be considered common to cloud based solutions:

• No requirement to operate or even understand in detail the underlying hardware technology or core software operating platform - you are abstracted away from the technical complexity of servers, routers, switches, etc.
• You access the cloud service only when you need it and are only charged for your use - pay-as-you-go model
• You are provided with verifiable SLAs and penalty or recovery clauses for used services
• You access cloud services that represent some unit of business input or value to you – underlying transactions, protocols and messaging are hidden in the cloud
• You do not require proprietary software or protocols to use cloud services integrated into your existing business applications domain – everything should be transparently available to existing development methods and practices (JEE, Web 2.0, SOA, etc.)
• You can choose to run cloud computing on your own site and infrastructure, on external hosted resources or on some combination of the two – mix and match onsite versus remote cloud operations

As you explore the benefits of cloud computing to your organization these simple principles may help you test your requirements against the declared offerings of your candidate or selected vendors (including Sensible Cloud).  You should thoroughly test the cloud offering be considered, against many or all of them.

Another definition of Cloud Computing

For more than a decade virtualization solutions have been maturing, to the point where they are now accepted as a core element of data center operations, and in fact form the foundation of the IaaS layer of cloud computing.  This is largely the result of businesses being driven by the need to better utilize the enormous capital and maintenance expenses invested in computer hardware and communications infrastructure.  A sector of information technology receiving a lot of attention is Virtualization servers. The prime outcome of virtualization technology is to provide a logical division (partitioning) of available computer servers, within the physical computer hardware.  This enables better management and utilization of the underlying hardware by applications.  A benefit of virtualization is operating X _Virtual Machine_s (VM) over Y physical machines and allocating resources independently of the physical make up of the hardware.  This concept has been around for decades offered by mainframes and UNIX machines.  The use of commodity priced PC hardware and open source middleware software makes the overall costs of assembling large quantities of computing resources reasonable and scalable.

Virtualization solutions concentrate on the abstraction of virtual resources from your physical computing resources on predominately technical aspects.  In order to instantiate a new VM potentially depends on a combination of CPU utilization, memory load and bandwidth throughput as the VM monitoring software detects changes in the VM.   There is no consideration of the business application and service that is running on the VM.  Business priorities should also be considered, such as one specific application is more valuable to the business and more resources should be applied as needed.  Also adding flexibility by providing the capability of virtualization of business applications and services across completely separate and different computing platforms (JEE, .NET, SOA, and clouds). Sensible Cloud has introduced the sense cloud management platform to solve these critical business challenges.

The sense platform enables the definition of business oriented criteria combined with the technical management of virtual resources.  _Business SLA_s, are utilized to allocate VM resources to specific applications under specific conditions (and subsequent release when no longer required to comply with the desired SLA). This permits value based allocation and closely aligns the resources to the demands of the applications. sense also provides this capability spanning the various computing models – JEE, web services, VMs and cloud based resources.   The disparate platform interoperability allows extension of existing infrastructure to bridge to a cloud oriented model without making the complete leap.

One use case is to apply the sense virtualization platform to buffer current infrastructure resources in the case of additional load to avoid the expense and installation of additional hardware.  Please see the sense platform for more details.

A service level agreement is a target of performance and quality for a service that is agreed to by the provider and client. SLA attributes and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to be measured for any service is dependent upon the value perceived by each of the stakeholders. Stakeholders include business owners, business managers, IT operations and development, administrators, executives, and also customers and partners.

A well defined, managed collection of SLAs allows the business to provide higher value and higher margin services to customers and preferred business channels. This is applicable in traditional business, internet commerce, and also intra-enterprise activities. SLA driven services can be monitored specifically to provide transaction, billing and penalty attributes to assist the business to track and manage overall performance.  A collection of SLAs can also be looked on as a policy – a business policy, a compliance policy, a corporate policy, etc.

Business owners and executives are typically provided the least amount of information and support in the critical aspect of managing information technology.  sense re-balances the equation and provides a clear way to assign business policies that are dynamically used at runtime to enforce SLAs.  sense business SLAs  enable the business to specify a performance level requirement on each of the service elements (and applications) participating in the cloud. sense is able to maintain the status and management of each single component in the federation.   sense and the sense managed nodes select the best component in the cloud that can respond to an incoming request. This dynamic runtime evaluation, decision and action execution allows the system to auto-tune depending upon circumstances at the moment of the request.  Scaling for additional load, bypassing and rerouting out-of-band services, instantiating new resources from the cloud to support higher value services, and other autonomic behaviors are simple examples of the dynamic capabilities of sense.

These capabilities increase the guarantee level of a business service to match the desired business SLA.   Extensive administrative and operational intervention is not needed along with the ability to limit and ‘throttle’ costs according to business policies limits.  Evaluations and actions are made transparently visible to the business users (if desired).

Logical approach to SLAs in sense

Sensible Cloud has adopted a logical and consistent approach to SLAs in sense.  Implementation and extension of the patterns described within the European Union (EU) research project SLA@SOI are currently underway.  The approach of ‘bottom up’ adopts the following principle steps:

• Analyze a business service and define its KPIs noting information on various entities and their interaction.  Then measure and ensure some level of service is provided to the requester
  • together with business stakeholders
• Define one fact (or occasionally more) for each KPI -  definite and measurable – for use in the core logic development of the SLA within the embedded Business Rules Engine
  • dialogue between a business analyst and the SLA Rules implementer
• Decide on a number of threshold levels for each fact/KPI – each of 5 levels (plus a null level) can be defined
  • HIGH – service is operating within normal bands and can easily accept more instances;
  • MEDIUM – service is loaded but can host additional instances;
  • LOW – service is very busy and it is appropriate to instruct a scaling strategy;
  • CRITICAL – service could stop functioning at any moment -strongly recommended to provide an alternative service provider for response or  assist the stressed service provider in some way;
  • NO_SERVICE – service is not accepting new instances because no more computational space is available or the service and network is down.  A mock strategy is activated when the service is declared with this status.  This lets the service, at minimum, to respond normally to the request (avoiding a domino effect).   sense can trigger self-healing strategies and send notifications to any nominated services and message managers. See here for more on mock strategy.
  • (NONE) – null threshold

This activity is conducted with the business stake holder and/or analyst

• Design actions at each threshold to ensure management is according to business policy and business deliverables for each fact/KPI threshold.  Actions may include incremental scale of SLA stress from early notification of a low level increase, to automated provisioning of cloud resources, to applications begin secure transfer of data and compute cycles to a disaster recovery partner.
  • available provisioning actions will depend on the technology base of the services – in this case elastic IaaS provisioning will help.  A set of provisioning steps can be described and developed in sense.  Also a higher level instructions set can be passed to an external provisioning environment
  • sense contains a simple sequence and an orchestrating construct that enables more complex processes to be managed directly

A logical view of this approach is designed here

The term service has been increasingly over used in marketing brochures of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions.

In the view of information technologies, a simple description of a service could be:  a self-describing software entity, designed and developed in isolation offering near frictionless interoperability to deliver business value or input.  This covers a wide spectrum of services including web, application, hardware, virtualization, cloud and others.

Most elements of computing technology and infrastructure that

1. have the ability to interface and interact,
2. can be affiliated and managed by an external actor,
3. deliver some form of measurable business input or value

are considered a services by sense.

sense is a self federating system that hosts:  nodes, services, external interactions, business rules and others.  Each entity is being represented with sense as a service.

In order to maintain an adequate service level, a sense service extends the idea of a Service Level Agreement (SLA) to declare business drivers to influence and change the behavior of a runtime scenario automatically without intervention. An SLA enables a service to declare a series of ‘states of health’ that are dispersed within the sense federation during runtime. The switch between the service level states is computed depending upon pre-defined criteria - average response time of the service, how much revenue is acquired by the service, etc.  sense evaluates the health, can overload the service and intelligently redirect the call to the best capable service provider within the federation.

As a last level fall back, if all services within the federation are failing, sense is able to intercept all the calls and propagate a mock response from the mock strategy configured for each service.  This protects the calling system from a possible system crash and enables the overall system to catch its breath.  The system continues operation while some of the services are still in an unavailable or crisis state.  The mock strategy disrupts a potential domino effect that would occur in many applications when one component of the system fails.