Yuan Chen - March 28, 2007
Title: "SLA Decomposition: Translating Service Level Objectives to
System Level Thresholds"
Abstract: Service Level Agreements (SLAs) capture the agreed upon
guarantees between a service provider and its customer. In today's
complex and highly dynamic computing environments, systems/services have
to be constantly adjusted to meet SLAs and to improve resource
utilization, thus reducing operating cost. Traditional design of such
systems usually involves domain experts who implicitly translate SLAs to
system-level thresholds in an ad-hoc manner. In this talk, I will
present an approach that combines performance modeling with performance
profiling to create models that translate SLAs to lower-level resource
requirements for each system involved in providing the service. Using
these models, the process of creating an efficient design of a
system/service can be automated, eliminating the involvement of domain
experts. Through our experimental results, we demonstrate that our
approach is practical and that it can be applied to different
applications and software architectures. Our experiments show that for a
typical 3-tier e-commerce application in a virtualized environment the
SLAs can be met while improving CPU utilization up to 3 times.
Bio: Yuan Chen is a post-doctoral researcher in Enterprise Systems and
Software Lab at HP Labs. Yuan received his Ph.D. from Georgia Institute
of Technology in 2005 and his BSc from University of Science and
Technology of China in 1994, both in Computer Science. Yuan's general
research interest is in distributed and enterprise systems. His current
research focuses on performance modeling and systems management of
complex and large-scale enterprise computing systems and developing
techniques for managing service level agreements (SLAs).
Sami Rollins