Towards a Proof-based SLA Management Framework

2012 IEEE 36th Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference, 2012

Cloud resources and services are offered based on Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that state usage terms and penalties in case of violations. Although, there is a large body of work in the area of SLA provisioning and monitoring at infrastructure and platform layers, SLAs are usually assumed to be guaranteed at the application layer. However, application monitoring is a challenging task due to monitored metrics of the platform or infrastructure layer that cannot be easily mapped to the required metrics at the application layer. Sophisticated SLA monitoring among those layers to avoid costly SLA penalties and maximize the provider profit is still an open research challenge. This paper proposes an application monitoring architecture named CASViD, which stands for Cloud Application SLA Violation Detection architecture. CASViD architecture monitors and detects SLA violations at the application layer, and includes tools for resource allocation, scheduling, and deployment. Different from most of the existing monitoring architectures, CASViD focuses on application level monitoring, which is relevant when multiple customers share the same resources in a Cloud environment. We evaluate our architecture in a real Cloud testbed using applications that exhibit heterogeneous behaviors in order to investigate the effective measurement intervals for efficient monitoring of different application types. The achieved results show that our architecture, with low intrusion level, is able to monitor, detect SLA violations, and suggest effective measurement intervals for various workloads.

In the present atmosphere of tighter budgets and pressure on resources, many public sector organizations , including local authorities, are outsourcing services to outer organizations under service level agreements in cloud computing. Cloud computing is an approach to convey facilitated benefits over the web. Services are available to the users relying upon cloud arrangement and the Service Level Agreement (SLA) between the service providers and the clients. Service level agreements are being utilized inside associations, directing connection between various sections of the association. It requires a commitment from both parties to support and adhere to the agreement in order for the SLA to work effectively. In spite of the fact that it gives a straightforward view about the cloud condition, such as cloud services, cloud distribution, security issues, responsibilities, agreements and warranties of the services. However, there are several issues occur from incorrect SLA which can cause misunderstanding among service providers and clients. SLA checking device confirm the SLA effectively whether it deals with all administrations as per SLA. In this paper, we represent a SLA confirmation and checking process that can distinguish SLA verification in gathering the information. We consider IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) parameters for SLA verification in Cloud.

2017

A cloud storage service implements security mechanisms to protect users’ data. Moreover, due to the loss of control over the cloud infrastructure, auditing and monitoring mechanisms are used to detect violations of security properties, increasing the trust and transparency in cloud services. However, there are flaws in existing solutions to ensure integrity, freshness and write-serializability properties. Then, we propose a monitoring and auditing mechanism to verify these properties, allowing to detect violations that are not identified by other solutions. Colored Petri Nets (CPNs) are used to model and validate the proposed mechanism. As results, the provider cannot deny the detected violations, and attacks are detected in real-time, except collusion attacks, identified only in our auditing phase.

Nowadays, cloud computing is a very interesting environment for researcher to look deep. It is more on computing delivery whereby service rather than a product. It provides infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and storage as a service. This technology is not involved end-user knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system when users deliver the services. The cloud computing concepts is derived from grid computing, whereby end-user no need to understand the devices and components or infrastructure required in retrieved the service. It is based on virtualization resources. Cloud computing is consider as a new area in research and there have a lots of problem especially regarding to Service Level Agreement (SLA). This research is focusing to verify whether the SLA is follow the contract or violated. All the results are used for validation of the cloud services based on its own SLA.

Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science, 2014

Recently, Cloud Computing has become an emerging research topic in response to the shift from product oriented economy to service-oriented economy and the move from focusing on software/system development to addressing business-IT alignment. Technically speaking, Cloud Computing enables to build Cloud Service-Based Application (CSBA) which cater for the tailoring of services to specific business needs using a mixture of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS solutions-possibly from various providers. In other words, in the context of CSBAs, cloud services are rented by clients from providers instead of owning the services. Due ti this specific nature, SLA (Service Level Agreement) has become a very important and up-to-date issues in CSBAs. Therefore SLA turns to be critical for both cloud service clients and providers and needs constant monitoring for various reasons mostly detecting if any violation happens but also preventing the violation in efficient way. As in CSBAs a number of providers are involved, it is a challenge to detect and resist violations of multiple SLAs that engage different providers form different locations. To deal with such a problem, this paper introduces a framework called PAEAN4CLOUD. The framework comprises components for monitoring, detecting, and configuring SLAs. An algorithm is proposed for automatic detection of SLA violations. The configuration component underpins assembling CSBAs automatically at runtime. The components help in preventing SLA violations and optimizing application performance as well.

2016

Cloud Computing is one of the most pervasive ICT changes of the last few years. Usually, Clouds offer a variety of Services, which are accessible over the Internet. These Services are regulated by some contracts called Service Level Agreements between Service providers and customers. The SLAs have already been introduced in Service Oriented Architectures in situations where some computing services need to be structured and regulated. In an SLA, the constraints of use, the duties and responsibilities of the parties involved, the charges and the service levels to guarantee, etc., are clearly stated by dedicated clauses. Despite the efforts made in systems security and the standardisation of SLAs, Cloud Services continues to suffer from various cybercriminal attacks, and unfortunately this phenomenon is likely to escalate within the next few years. It becomes urgent to take some countermeasures against these illegal practices to increase both the customer trust and quality of services of such new technologies. One of the alternatives for this phenomenon is to provide an efficient cloud Forensic Readiness System (FRS) to prevent and alert the provider and/or customer of any suspect attacks or strange behaviour. Much attention has been given to FRSs and they have certainly moved from simple log files and monitoring to very sophisticated components involving both human experts and computer analysis tools. In this paper we study the effect of SLAs on FRSs. As SLAs may be different from one jurisdiction to another we believe that FRSs should also comply with jurisdiction for more efficiency and speed of isolating and resolving forensic cases. Therefore, we propose an FRS that takes into account automatically SLAs and issue warnings and alerts to its users (providers and consumers) based on the jurisdiction and the nature of security breach and attacks. These SLAs are presented to the system as a set of rules (clauses). This will also prevent illegal data transfers and communications among different jurisdictions. Part of this paper will be dedicated to the formalisation of these SLAs and study its consequences on the FRS architecture and functioning. The rest of the paper will be dedicated to the design and development of the FRS reference architecture integrating the proposed SLA formal model.

International Conference on Cloud Computing, 2015

Cloud Computing services are regulated by a contract called Service Level Agreement (SLA). They are cosigned between the customers and the providers after a negotiation phase, and during their validity time several constraints have to be respected by the involved parties. Due to their popularity, cloud services are enormously used and unfortunately also abused, specially by cyber-criminals. Sometimes the crimes have the consequence of violating some contractual constraints without the parties are aware of. A manner for guaranteeing more control of the SLA respect is to consider a dedicated system interacting with the cloud services and detecting the SLA violations by analysing the log files. Our proposal will introduce a formal model aimed to represent the contents of such SLAs with rules in the context of an automatic mechanism for detecting SLA violations.

2016

Cloud servers is a platform for enabling convenient, on demand network access to a shared pool of configurable server resources (memory, networks, storage, cpu, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or cloud service provider interactions. Cloud servers are mostly being used; however, data security is one of the major barriers to adoption in cloud storage. Users can store data and used on demand or for the applications without keeping any local copy of the data on there machine. The Cloud servers storage technologies offers the promise of massive cost savings combined with increased IT agility due to pay per consume. However, this technology challenges many traditional approaches to hosting provider and enterprise application design and management. Users can able to upload data on cloud storage without worrying about to check or verify the integrity. Hence integrity auditing for cloud data is more important task to ens...

Data Intensive Storage Services for Cloud Environments, 2013

The evolution of Internet provides a platform for using IT services. Many transactions are executed by Web services, such as data storage, online purchasing etc. Companies, media, and other fields need to store large amount of data, to retrieve data and/or to exchange data online from any geographic location anytime. The need of a formal contract for describing what functionalities are provided and under which terms (e.g. cost, conditions, obligations, etc.) is essential.

Cloud computing is a cumulative collection of technologies. It shares on-demand computing resources that are positioned and disposed efficiently. In spite of several benefits, numerous challenges are there such as Data security, Performance, Data Locking, Access control, Bandwidth costs, Internet Dependency, Data confidentiality, Auditability, Application and Availability. SLA (Service Level Agreement) plays a vital role in cloud computing. Each service associates with a specific SLA. This is collaboration between service providers and consumer. Therefore, SLA has to define the level of security and their intricacy established on the services to make the consumer realize about the implementation of security policies. The proposed research paper tries to evaluate the challenges in enforcing security for cloud computing services and describe the necessity of a regularization of SLA.