Davide M. Parrilli, ICRI

Brussels, 13 January 2009

SLAs in a Grid Environment:The Legal Assessment

http://www.law.kuleuven.be/icri

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).

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.

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.

Scenarios

Grid/technology

provider

Service provider

End user

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…

…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-liabilities to be negotiated on a case-by-

case basis or imposed by the providercase basis or imposed by the provider.

In particular:

management on top of the allocated resources: availability

(compute resources, storage etc), network performance (latency, throughput), etc.

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!

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).

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

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.

Google:

SLA for Google Apps Premium Edition: 99 % availability.

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.

Thanks for you attention!

Davide M. Parrilli

ICRI-K.U. Leuven-IBBT

davide.parrilli@law.kuleuven.be