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Translating Service Level Objectives to lower level policies for multi-tier services

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Abstract

Service providers and their customers agree on certain quality of service guarantees through Service Level Agreements (SLA). An SLA contains one or more Service Level Objectives (SLO)s that describe the agreed-upon quality requirements at the service level. Translating these SLOs into lower-level policies that can then be used for design and monitoring purposes is a difficult problem. Usually domain experts are involved in this translation that often necessitates application of domain knowledge to this problem. In this article, we propose an approach that combines performance modeling with regression analysis to solve this problem. We demonstrate that our approach is practical and that it can be applied to different n-tier services. Our experiments show that for a typical 3-tier e-commerce application in a virtualized environment, the SLA can be met while improving CPU utilization by up to 3 times.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hewlett Packard Labs, Palo Alto, CA, 94304, USA

    Yuan Chen, Subu Iyer, Dejan Milojicic & Akhil Sahai

  2. School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montreal, H3A 2A7, Canada

    Xue Liu

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  1. Yuan Chen
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  2. Subu Iyer
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  3. Xue Liu
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  4. Dejan Milojicic
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  5. Akhil Sahai
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Correspondence to Yuan Chen.

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Chen, Y., Iyer, S., Liu, X. et al. Translating Service Level Objectives to lower level policies for multi-tier services. Cluster Comput 11, 299–311 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-008-0059-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-008-0059-6

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