Service Level Agreements

With the emergence of infrastructure such as "Cloud Computing" (Google's DFS, Amazon EC2 and S3, IBM's "Blue Cloud", etc), it is now becoming clear that Service Level Agreements will play an important role in the future of such infrastructure. SLAs enable a client to establish a relationship with a provider in the context of a particular service provision. This is especially useful when services need to be integrated from a variety of different sources -- an example being the photo sharing site SmugMug.com utilizing Amazon's S3 service for storage (more on programmableweb.com). Wolfgang Ziegler, Philipp Wieder, Ramin Yahyapour and I are organizing a workshop alongside the IEEE/ACM Grid 2008 conference focusing on the use of SLAs in Grids. Deadline for submission is end of May 2008. Workshop takes place towards the end of September 2008 in Tsukuba, Japan.