Penalty Management in the SLA@SOI Project

One important differentiation of SLAs from best-effort service provisioning requests is the annotation with penalties: all those provisions that define what will happen in the case that a provider fails to deliver the agreed service. The consequences of such failures may be some kind of refund, additional (free) service points, and so on. This chapter explores this topic, starting from a business perspective. It reviews the current implementation of the SLA@SOI project capabilities for monitoring and reporting SLA violations, and eventually proposes a new formalisation for penalty definition. This formal model takes into account requirements for fairness and business value. Following the model’s definition, an example is provided that links the model to SLA hierarchies.