Managing Service Level Agreements in Distributed Systems

This project seeks to simplify the development and management of business processes deployed on a distributed Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The target architecture is an enterprise system with distributed services coordinated by application workflows or business processes. Declarative goals, specified in Service Level Agreements (SLA), are used to assist in the development of such applications, and to automate the monitoring, deployment, and resource provisioning tasks. The complexity of developing and maintaining these processes is addressed by systematic SOA development cycles that identify the roles and specialities required by participants at each stage of the development cycle. While tools exist to assist in this process, the development, administration and maintenance of a business process still requires much manual effort that can be automated. In particular, the business process' nonfunctional goals, often expressed as Service Level Agreements (SLA), need to be manually considered at each stage of the development process. For example, completion time requirement for a process will influence decisions in the development, deployment and resource provisioning, and monitoring of the process. In our approach, the SLAs are captured and formalized early in the development process in a machine-understandable form. This allows the system to interpret, infer, automate various tasks. For example, an SLA on the required throughput of a process can automatically activate the instrumentation and generate the rules necessary to monitor the process throughput.

Faculty Supervisor:

Dr. Hans-Arno Jacobsen

Student:

Young Yoon and Chunyang Ye

Partner:

IBM Canada

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Information and communications technologies

University:

University of Toronto