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Title
SLA MANAGEMENT IN A COLLABORATIVE NETWORK OF FEDERATED CLOUDS: THE
CLOUDLEND
Faculty Advisor
Dr. Mohamed Adel Serhani
Defense Date
20 November 2016
Abstract
Cloud services have always promised to be available, flexible, and speedy. However, not a single Cloud
provider can deliver such promises to their distinctly demanding customers. Cloud providers have a
constrained geographical presence, and are willing to invest in infrastructure only when it is profitable
to them. Cloud federation is a concept that collectively combines segregated Cloud services to create
an extended pool of resources for Clouds to competently deliver their promised level of services. This
dissertation is concerned with studying the governing aspects related to the federation of Clouds through
collaborative networking. The main objective of this dissertation is to define a framework for a Cloud
network that considers balancing the trade-offs among customers’ various quality of service (QoS)
requirements, as well as providers› resources utilization. We propose a network of federated Clouds,
CloudLend, that creates a platform for Cloud providers to collaborate, and for customers to expand their
service selections. We also define and specify a service level agreement (SLA) management model in order
to govern and administer the relationships established between different Cloud services in CloudLend. We
define a multi-level SLA specification model to annotate and describe QoS terms, in addition to a game
theory-based automated SLA negotiation model that supports both customers and providers in negotiating
SLA terms, and guiding them towards signing a contract. We also define an adaptive agent-based SLA
monitoring model which identifies the root causes of SLA violations, and impartially distributes any updates
and changes in established SLAs to all relevant entities. Formal verification proved that our proposed
framework assures customers with maximum optimized guarantees to their QoS requirements, in addition
to supporting Cloud providers to make informed resource utilization decisions. Additionally, simulation
results demonstrate the effectiveness of our SLA management model. Our proposed CloudLend network
and its SLA management model paves the way to resource sharing among different Cloud providers,
which allows for the providers’ lock-in constraints to be broken, allowing effortless migration of customers’
applications across different providers whenever is needed.
Dissertation
ASMA OBAID HAMAD SAEED SUBAIH
AL FALASI
Department of Information Systems and Security
College of Information Technology