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SLAs in a Grid Environment: The Legal Assessment

This article explores the impact of Grid computing on SLAs and examines if Grid has the ability to influence the content of SLAs. It discusses the contractual relationships between parties, the content of SLAs, and the benefits of better expected services in Grid environments. Examples of SLAs in business practice are provided.

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SLAs in a Grid Environment: The Legal Assessment

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  1. SLAs in a Grid Environment:The Legal Assessment Davide M. Parrilli, ICRI Brussels, 13 January 2009 http://www.law.kuleuven.be/icri

  2. SLA: a contract between a user and a provider of a service specifying the conditions under which a service may be used. It describes the provider’s commitments and specifies the penalties if those commitments are not met. An SLA is a legally enforceable contract (exceptions do exist in academia).

  3. Legal assessment of the impact of Grid computing on SLAs Question: Is Grid able to influence the content of the SLA(s)? Topic relevant for all technologies that adopt dispersed resources and increase the quality of the offered services.

  4. Method of the research: • Survey between the BEs of BEinGRID. The BEs responded to the above question: 20 % said ‘yes’, the others have to think about that; • Analysis of business practices.

  5. SLA 1: Grid provider/Service provider SLA 2: Service provider/End user Often in the business practice the SLA must be read in combination with other contracts (e.g. customer agreement): we focus on the contractual relationship between the parties regulating… Grid/technology provider Service provider End user Scenarios

  6. … The content of the SLA (technology provider-service provider, service provider-end user), i.e.: • QoS: availability, system performance; • Fees; • Assistance and support service; • Security; • Liabilities and remedies (service credits); • The use of the Grid and of the Grid/Cloud-based services made by the customer: no gambling, child pornography, discriminations, phishing, viruses, trojan horses, etc. – liabilities to be negotiated on a case-by-case basis or imposed by the provider.

  7. In particular: management on top of the allocated resources: availability (compute resources, storage etc), network performance (latency, throughput), etc.

  8. Question of a typical customer: Why should the SLA in a Grid environment be the same as in non Grid scenarios? Better expected services = more favorable SLA for the customer!

  9. Answer of the rational and informed customer: If I pay (more?) for a service that is expected to be better than that I was used to, I want to see this in the SLA I sign (influence of technology on legal agreements).

  10. Examples in the business practice: Amazon: • S3 Simple Storage Service (storage in 1 bucket): service availability 99.9 %; • EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud: 99.95 % availability. Grid/Cloud influence SLAs: better services = different SLAs

  11. Joyent: “Cloud computing brought to you with the power of the Joyent Accelerator”. Accelerator hosting SLA (Grid container hosting account services): 100 % availability for all users.

  12. Google: SLA for Google Apps Premium Edition: 99 % availability.

  13. Conclusions: The content of an SLA in a Grid environment is expected to be more favorable for the client and to set a higher level of commitment for the provider.

  14. Thanks for you attention! Davide M. Parrilli ICRI-K.U. Leuven-IBBT davide.parrilli@law.kuleuven.be

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