Service level management in cloud computing

Melanie Holloway explores a cloud broker offering service level agreement negotiation and monitoring as a service to consumers. She proposes a negotiation mechanism, which enables the achievement of economically efficient agreements, and an approach for reliable consumer side availability monitoring in conjunction with strategies for robust monitor placement. The author addresses the loss of control of consumers over critical aspects, specifically quality of service, when using services from the cloud. Basically, the cloud computing paradigm places the responsibility for resource management on the provider side. Hence, the control over cloud service performance is very limited on the consumer side.