SLAs Empowering Services in the Future Internet

IT-supported service provisioning has become of major relevance in all industries and domains. However, the goal of reaching a truly service-oriented economy would require that IT-based services can be flexibly traded as economic good, i.e. under well defined and dependable conditions and with clearly associated costs. With this paper we claim for the need of creating a holistic view for the management of service level agreements (SLAs) which addresses the management of services and their related SLAs through the complete service lifecycle, from engineering to decommissioning. Furthermore, we propose an SLA management framework that can become a core element for managing SLAs in the Future Internet. Last, we present early results and experiences gained in four different industrial use cases, covering the areas of Enterprise IT, ERP Hosting, Telco Service Aggregation, and eGovernment.