J.M.: SLAWs: towards a conceptual architecture for SLA enforcement

Current technologies in Service Oriented Computing (SOC) provide a solid framework to drive the interaction of organizations from a functional point of view. In or-der to introduce non-functional properties in this scenario, the concept of Service Level Agreement (SLAs) comes into play as a key element. SLAs can be seen as containers of the functional and non-functional properties that both par-ties (the service consumer and the service provider) agree specifying its rights and obligations during the interaction. However this SLAs represent an additional responsibility for the service provider since it motivates the need of a SLA-Enforcement process in its infrastructure. A proper SLA-enforcement implies optimized resource usage that meet SLAs established with consumer, making it possible to the provider afford a larger number of customers to maximize its benefits. Current approaches to SLA enforcement are domain-specific approaches and/or based on monolithic platforms (from a SOC point of view).In this paper we propose a con-ceptual architecture (SLAWs) for SLA enforcement. The main goal of the proposed architecture is to be used as a conceptual framework to build a flexible SLA enforcement layer. This layer could be integrated in a seamless way in the pre-existing provider infrastructure when is based upon the service oriented architecture principles. 1