Managing on-demand business applications with hierarchical service level agreements

Business applications are facing an increasing demand for being delivered as on-demand services. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are a common way for specifying the exact conditions how services are delivered, both for business- and IT-based services. At the same time, the paradigm of service-orientation is expanded to different domains such as business and IT-based services. Services are composed out of other services across domains. Consequently, SLAs have to managed across such service hierarchies. In this paper, we present the lessons learned from applying a generic, multi-layer SLA management framework to the context of on-demand business applications. We explain the implemented architecture and show how a hierarchy of services can be managed via SLAs. We explain in detail how SLAs can be established for different layers and how SLA terms are translated across the service hierarchy.