ABSTRACT
The Service-Level-Agreement (SLA) is an agreement between two or more parties, where one is the customer and the others are service providers. This can be a legally binding formal or an informal “contract”. According to recently searched for information, the working group identified ten areas where SLA metrics are required: accessibility, availability, performance, service reliability, data management, attestations, certs and audits, change management, Cloud service support, governance and termination of service. As applications are moved from dedicated hardware into the Cloud, they need to achieve the same or even more demanding levels of service than classical installations. SLAs for Cloud services focus on characteristics of the data center and more recently include characteristics of the network to support end-to-end SLAs. Each SLA goes through a sequence of steps starting from identification of terms and conditions, activation and monitoring of the stated terms and conditions, and eventual termination of contract once the hosting relationship ceases to exist.
