Towards deployment contracts in large scale clusters & desktop grids

While many dream and talk about Service Level Agree-ment (SLA) and Quality of Service (QoS) for Service Ori-ented Architectures (SOA), the practical reality of Grid computing is still far from providing effective techniques en-abling such contractual agreements. Towards this goal, this paper provides an overview of the techniques offered by ProActive to set and use contrac-tual agreements. Based on the identification of roles, appli-cation developer, infrastructure manager, application user, the actors of a Grid environment can specify what is re-quired or what is provided at various levels. The results are both flexibility and adaptability, matching the application constraints and the environment characteristics with vari-ous techniques.