Service Level Checking in the Cloud Computing Context

Cloud Computing raises numerous questions about the implementation and deployment of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and virtualization. It also raises questions related to services contracts, their management and verification, independently of services migration within the Cloud(s). Issues and solutions related to the verification of contracts compliance are referred as Service Level Checking (SLC). Implementing SLC in the Cloud Computing context requires an innovating and functional architecture, in order to separate monitoring information collection concerns from contracts compliance verification concerns. Such contracts or Service Level Agreements (SLAs) apply to the target systems and services. In order to solve the separation of concerns issue, we have used the mediation approach. Our architecture and prototype have been implemented and validated in the context of the French ANR SemEUsE and European Celtic SERVERY cooperative research projects.