SLA-Ready & ETSI

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) CSC Phase II (finished in December 2015) produced four reports: Cloud Computing User Needs (WI1), Standards and Open Source (WI2), Interoperability and Security (WI3), and Standards Maturity Assessment (WI1). The topic of Cloud SLAs was mostly in the focus of the WI3 report.

SLA-Ready Input

SLA-Ready provided feedback on Cloud SLAs to the WI3 report during the public commenting period in September-2015. The following areas were covered:

• Proposed a categorization of Cloud SLA standards, given that the reviewed version did not have such classification;

• Proposed further research/awareness on the topic of machine-readable SLAs, as considered by the SLA-Ready CRM;

• Provided explicit references to the work being done by ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC 38/WG 3 on Cloud SLAs;

• Highlighted the relevance of metrics/SLOs/SQOs for the creation of Cloud SLAs.

The final version of the ETSI CSC Phase II WI3 report managed and integrated all the received SLA-Ready comments .

With the ETSI CSC Phase II activity finalized in December 2015, resulting reports will become part of the CRM’s recommended set of guidelines for understanding Cloud SLAs. During 2016, the SLA-Ready consortium will further analyse the recommended set of actions (in particular from WI3) to fine-tune the CRM. In particular:

• The relevance and potential high-value use of the upcoming framework for Cloud SLA (ISO/IEC 19086 Part 1 to 4);

• Using the Cloud SLA to identify and populate core concepts with content relevant for the Cloud service for which the Cloud SLA is created, in order to substantially alleviate the burden of keeping track of all relevant areas that need to be included in the Cloud SLA;

• The availability of standardised metrics that can be populated with values set in the Cloud SLA as a mean to provide better visibility in terms of the level of quality of the Cloud services provided, thus establishing better trust and confidence in the Cloud Computing space.