Impact of consumer involvement in Grid SLA creation

Abstract

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) have been identified as an important tool in guaranteeing Quality of Service (QoS) in Grid service provisioning and consumption in commercial Grids. SLA templates are commonly drawn and predefined by Grid service providers. However, due to the rigidity exhibited by this existing provider-initiated (PI) technique, service consumers are reluctant to take up the use of commercial Grid. Researchers propose a consumer-initiated approach to SLA template creation (C-SLA) which makes use of the Weighted Euclidean Distance Function to select an SLA template appropriate to an individual consumer. Furthermore, the paper evaluate the impact of this approach on consumer satisfaction as compared to the classical PI approach to determine the possibility of our approach, C-SLA, being a viable solution to be implemented to strengthen the uptake of SLAs by Small Medium and Micro Enterprises (SMMEs) in the commercial Grid enterprise.