SUSE® today announced SUSE OpenStack Cloud 7, the latest enterprise-ready OpenStack platform for building Infrastructure-as-a-Service private clouds. Powered by newly released OpenStack Newton, SUSE OpenStack Cloud 7 includes new Container-as-a-Service capabilities along with non-disruptive upgrade capabilities to avoid downtime and service interruption. These enhancements offer customers the ability to accelerate innovation and improve agility to deliver value faster and overcome the shifting challenges of today’s business environment.

1. Apostila Ingles Uptime Definition In Hindi

Apostila translation in Czech-English dictionary. En A comparative assessment of the impacts indicates that the legislative measure abolishing legalisation and Apostille and simplifying the use of certified copies and certified translations (policy option 4), combined with an improved administrative cooperation between the Member States through a modern communication network based on the.

“SUSE is delivering the full value of OpenStack, helping customers mix evolution with revolution and build a software-defined infrastructure that propels their business forward,” said Joseph George, SUSE vice president of Solutions Strategy. “SUSE OpenStack Cloud is uniquely positioned to assist customers to take full advantage of rapidly evolving technology trends such as containers and DevOps for the development of new cloud-native workloads. It also enables them to migrate more mission-critical workloads to their cloud. SUSE is committed to incorporating the best technologies to benefit our customers, making SUSE OpenStack Cloud the fastest to deploy, configure and manage, helping accelerate the delivery of real business benefits.”

Apostila Ingles Uptime Definition In Hindi

Paul Miller and Lauren Nelson, senior analysts at Forrester Research, wrote, “CIOs from government, film and media, retail, finance and insurance, consumer goods, and manufacturing are among those moving beyond evaluations and pilots to adopt OpenStack-based clouds that meet the strategic requirements of their business.” Earlier in the report, they wrote of OpenStack, “[It] offers CIOs a credible platform upon which they can drive the transformations required for their business to become innovative, agile, and truly responsive to evolving customer needs.”*

Enhancements to SUSE OpenStack Cloud 7 will include:

• Full support for Docker, using Kubernetes as the container orchestration framework delivered via the integration of OpenStack Magnum. This provides customers with Container-as-a-Service capabilities to design and build new, innovative cloud-native workloads and applications and support DevOps processes and environments.

• Delivery of non-disruptive upgrade capabilities to avoid downtime and service interruption experienced when migrating to new OpenStack releases.

• Additional high availability capabilities, including HA protection for virtual machines and workloads to complement existing HA support for the control plane and compute nodes. This enables customers to move business-critical applications to their cloud with confidence.

• Integration of OpenStack Manila with CephFS, delivered through SUSE Enterprise Storage. This provides a unified storage environment that enables customers to run production workloads for block, object, and file storage within a single cluster to reduce capital and operation costs.

• Improved scalability providing deployment support across multiple data centers to enable users to access, manage and control multiple private clouds through a single user interface.

Kalyan Muppaneni, founder and CEO of Pi DATACENTERS, a state-of-the-art, greenfield data center and enterprise-class cloud service provider based in India, said, “The innovation and tailored cloud services we offer to our customers as part of our @PiCloud™ offering are backed by the agility and stability of SUSE OpenStack Cloud. Our solutions help customers be quicker to market, giving them a competitive edge in their respective industries. Be it for development of new containers for microservices-based apps or to host legacy workloads in the cloud, SUSE OpenStack Cloud provides the flexible, secure and rock-solid cloud platform that is just right for our customer needs.”

SUSE is previewing SUSE OpenStack Cloud 7 Oct. 25-28 at OpenStack Summit in Barcelona in booth D27. The solution will be generally available in December. For more information, visit www.suse.com/cloud/.

About SUSE

SUSE, a pioneer in open source software, provides reliable, interoperable Linux, cloud infrastructure and storage solutions that give enterprises greater control and flexibility. More than 20 years of engineering excellence, exceptional service and an unrivaled partner ecosystem power the products and support that help our customers manage complexity, reduce cost, and confidently deliver mission-critical services. The lasting relationships we build allow us to adapt and deliver the smarter innovation they need to succeed – today and tomorrow. For more information, visit www.suse.com.

*“Brief: OpenStack Is Now Ready For Business,” Forrester Research, Sept. 16, 2015

Copyright 2016 SUSE LLC. All rights reserved. SUSE and the SUSE logo are registered trademarks of SUSE LLC in the United States and other countries. All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

A service-level agreement (SLA) is a commitment between a service provider and a client. Particular aspects of the service – quality, availability, responsibilities – are agreed between the service provider and the service user.^[1] The most common component of SLA is that the services should be provided to the customer as agreed upon in the contract. As an example, Internet service providers and telcos will commonly include service level agreements within the terms of their contracts with customers to define the level(s) of service being sold in plain language terms. In this case the SLA will typically have a technical definition in mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to repair or mean time to recovery (MTTR); identifying which party is responsible for reporting faults or paying fees; responsibility for various data rates; throughput; jitter; or similar measurable details.

• 4Specific examples

Overview[edit]

A service-level agreement is an agreement between two or more parties, where one is the customer and the others are service providers. This can be a legally binding formal or an informal 'contract' (for example, internal department relationships). The agreement may involve separate organizations, or different teams within one organization. Contracts between the service provider and other third parties are often (incorrectly) called SLAs – because the level of service has been set by the (principal) customer, there can be no 'agreement' between third parties; these agreements are simply 'contracts.' Operational-level agreements or OLAs, however, may be used by internal groups to support SLAs. If some aspect of a service has not been agreed with the customer, it is not an 'SLA'.

SLAs commonly include many components, from a definition of services to the termination of agreement.^[2] To ensure that SLAs are consistently met, these agreements are often designed with specific lines of demarcation and the parties involved are required to meet regularly to create an open forum for communication. Rewards and penalties applying to the provider are often specified. Most SLAs also leave room for periodic (annual) revisitation to make changes.^[3]

Since late 1980s SLAs have been used by fixed line telecom operators. SLAs are so widely used these days that larger organizations have many different SLAs existing within the company itself. Two different units in an organization script a SLA with one unit being the customer and another being the service provider. This practice helps to maintain the same quality of service amongst different units in the organization and also across multiple locations of the organization. This internal scripting of SLA also helps to compare the quality of service between an in-house department and an external service provider.^[4]

The output received by the customer as a result of the service provided is the main focus of the service level agreement.

Service level agreements are also defined at different levels:

• Customer-based SLA: An agreement with an individual customer group, covering all the services they use. For example, an SLA between a supplier (IT service provider) and the finance department of a large organization for the services such as finance system, payroll system, billing system, procurement/purchase system, etc.
• Service-based SLA: An agreement for all customers using the services being delivered by the service provider. For example:
  • A mobile service provider offers a routine service to all the customers and offers certain maintenance as a part of an offer with the universal charging.
  • An email system for the entire organization. There are chances of difficulties arising in this type of SLA as level of the services being offered may vary for different customers (for example, head office staff may use high-speed LAN connections while local offices may have to use a lower speed leased line).
• Multilevel SLA: The SLA is split into the different levels, each addressing different set of customers for the same services, in the same SLA.
  • Corporate-level SLA: Covering all the generic service level management (often abbreviated as SLM) issues appropriate to every customer throughout the organization. These issues are likely to be less volatile and so updates (SLA reviews) are less frequently required.
  • Customer-level SLA: covering all SLM issues relevant to the particular customer group, regardless of the services being used.
  • Service-level SLA: covering all SLM issue relevant to the specific services, in relation to this specific customer group.

Components[edit]

A well defined and typical SLA will contain the following components:^[5]

• Type of service to be provided: It specifies the type of service and any additional details of type of service to be provided. In case of an IP network connectivity, type of service will describe functions such as operation and maintenance of networking equipment, connection bandwidth to be provided, etc.
• The service's desired performance level, especially its reliability and responsiveness: A reliable service will be the one which suffers minimum disruptions in a specific amount of time and is available at almost all times. A service with good responsiveness will perform the desired action promptly after the customer requests for it.
• Monitoring process and service level reporting: This component describes how the performance levels are supervised and monitored. This process involves gathering of different type of statistics, how frequently this statistics will be collected and how this statistics will be accessed by the customers.
• The steps for reporting issues with the service: This component will specify the contact details to report the problem to and the order in which details about the issue have to be reported. The contract will also include a time range in which the problem will be looked upon and also till when the issue will be resolved.
• Response and issue resolution time-frame: Response time-frame is the time period by which the service provider will start the investigation of the issue. Issue resolution time-frame is the time period by which the current service issue will be resolved and fixed.
• Repercussions for service provider not meeting its commitment: If the provider is not able to meet the requirements as stated in SLA then service provider will have to face consequences for the same. These consequences may include customer's right to terminate the contract or ask for a refund for losses incurred by the customer due to failure of service.

Common metrics[edit]

Service-level agreements can contain numerous service-performance metrics with corresponding service-level objectives. A common case in IT-service management is a call center or service desk. Metrics commonly agreed to in these cases include:

• Abandonment Rate: Percentage of calls abandoned while waiting to be answered.
• ASA (Average Speed to Answer): Average time (usually in seconds) it takes for a call to be answered by the service desk.
• TSF (Time Service Factor): Percentage of calls answered within a definite timeframe, e.g., 80% in 20 seconds.
• FCR (First-Call Resolution): Percentage of incoming calls that can be resolved without the use of a callback or without having the caller call back the helpdesk to finish resolving the case.^[6]
• TAT (Turn-Around Time): Time taken to complete a certain task.
• MTTR (Mean Time To Recover): Time taken to recover after an outage of service.

Uptime is also a common metric, often used for data services such as shared hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated servers. Common agreements include percentage of network uptime, power uptime, number of scheduled maintenance windows, etc.

Many SLAs track to the Information Technology Infrastructure Library specifications when applied to IT services.

Specific examples[edit]

Backbone Internet providers[edit]

It is not uncommon for an internet backbone service provider (or network service provider) to explicitly state its own SLA on its website.^[7][8][9] The U.S. Telecommunications Act of 1996 does not expressly mandate that companies have SLAs, but it does provide a framework for firms to do so in Sections 251 and 252.^[10] Section 252(c)(1) for example ('Duty to Negotiate') requires Incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) to negotiate in good faith about matters such as resale and access to rights of way.

WSLA[edit]

A web service level agreement (WSLA) is a standard for service level agreement compliance monitoring of web services. It allows authors to specify the performance metrics associated with a web service application, desired performance targets, and actions that should be performed when performance is not met.

WSLA Language Specification, version 1.0 was published by IBM on January 28, 2001.

Cloud computing[edit]

The underlying benefit of cloud computing is shared resources, which is supported by the underlying nature of a shared infrastructure environment. Thus, SLAs span across the cloud and are offered by service providers as a service-based agreement rather than a customer-based agreement. Measuring, monitoring and reporting on cloud performance is based on the end UX or their ability to consume resources. The downside of cloud computing relative to SLAs is the difficulty in determining the root cause of service interruptions due to the complex nature of the environment.

As applications are moved from dedicated hardware into the cloud, they need to achieve the same or even more demanding levels of service than classical installations. SLAs for cloud services focus on characteristics of the data center and more recently include characteristics of the network (see carrier cloud) to support end-to-end SLAs.^[11]

Any SLA management strategy considers two well-differentiated phases: negotiating the contract and monitoring its fulfilment in real time. Thus, SLA management encompasses the SLA contract definition: the basic schema with the QoS parameters; SLA negotiation; SLA monitoring; SLA violation detection; and SLA enforcement—according to defined policies.

The main point is to build a new layer upon the grid, cloud, or SOA middleware able to create a negotiation mechanism between the providers and consumers of services. An example is the EU–funded Framework 7 research project, SLA@SOI,^[12] which is researching aspects of multi-level, multi-provider SLAs within service-oriented infrastructure and cloud computing, while another EU-funded project, VISION Cloud,^[13] has provided results with respect to content-oriented SLAs.

FP7 IRMOS also investigated aspects of translating application-level SLA terms to resource-based attributes in an effort to bridge the gap between client-side expectations and cloud-provider resource-management mechanisms.^[14][15] A summary of the results of various research projects in the area of SLAs (ranging from specifications to monitoring, management and enforcement) has been provided by the European Commission.^[16]

Outsourcing[edit]

Outsourcing involves the transfer of responsibility from an organization to a supplier. This new arrangement is managed through a contract that may include one or more SLAs. The contract may involve financial penalties and the right to terminate if any of the SLAs metrics are consistently missed. Setting, tracking and managing SLAs is an important part of the outsourcing relationship management (ORM) discipline. Specific SLAs are typically negotiated up front as part of the outsourcing contract and used as one of the primary tools of outsourcing governance.

In software development, specific SLAs can apply to application outsourcing contracts in line with standards in software quality, as well as recommendations provided by neutral organizations like CISQ, which has published numerous papers on the topic (such as Using Software Measurement in SLAs^[17]) that are available to the public.

See also[edit]

• Operational-level agreement (OLA)
• Service-oriented architecture (SOA)

References[edit]

1. ^Kearney, K.T.; Torelli, F. (2011). 'The SLA Model'. In Wieder, P.; Butler, J.M.; Theilmann, W.; Yahyapour, R. (eds.). Service Level Agreements for Cloud Computing. Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. pp. 43–68. ISBN9781461416142.
2. ^'The Service Level Agreement Zone'. SLA Information Zone. Service Level Agreement Zone. 2015. Retrieved 22 June 2016.
3. ^Shacklett, M.E. (12 January 2011). 'Five Key Points for Every SLA'. Dell. Archived from the original on 22 December 2012. Retrieved 22 June 2016.
4. ^Ding, Jianguo (2010). Advances in Network Management. Auerbach Publications. ISBN978-1-4200-6455-1.
5. ^Verma, Dinesh (September 2004). 'Service level agreements on IP networks'(PDF). 92 (9).Cite journal requires journal= (help)
6. ^Desmarais, Mike (2012). 'First Call Resolution'(PDF).
7. ^'Global IP Network SLA'. NTT Communications. Retrieved 22 June 2016.
8. ^'Global Latency and Packet Delivery SLA'. Verizon. Retrieved 22 June 2016.
9. ^'Business Edition - AT&T U-verse Voice and TV - Terms of Service (TOS) and AT&T Broadband - Service Level Agreement (SLA)'. AT&T. Retrieved 22 June 2016.
10. ^Wikisource:Telecommunications Act of 1996#SEC. 101. ESTABLISHMENT OF PART II OF TITLE II.
11. ^Rueda, J.L.; Gómez, S.G.; Chimento, A.E. (2011). 'The Service Aggregator Use Case Scenario'. In Wieder, P.; Butler, J.M.; Theilmann, W.; Yahyapour, R. (eds.). Service Level Agreements for Cloud Computing. Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. pp. 329–342. ISBN9781461416142.
12. ^Butler, J.M.; Yahyapour, R.; Theilmann, W. (2011). 'Motivation and Overview'. In Wieder, P.; Butler, J.M.; Theilmann, W.; Yahyapour, R. (eds.). Service Level Agreements for Cloud Computing. Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. pp. 3–12. ISBN9781461416142.
13. ^Villari, M.; Tusa, F.; Celesti, A.; Puliafito, A. (2012). 'How to Federate VISION Cloud through SAML/Shibboleth Authentication'. In De Paoli, F.; Pimentel, E.; Zavattaro, G. (eds.). Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. pp. 259–274. ISBN9783642334276.
14. ^Boniface, M.; Nasser, B.; Papay, J.; et al. (2010). 'Platform-as-a-Service Architecture for Real-Time Quality of Service Management in Clouds'(PDF). ICIW '10: Proceedings of the 2010 Fifth International Conference on Internet and Web Applications and Services: 155–160. doi:10.1109/ICIW.2010.91. ISBN978-1-4244-6728-0.
15. ^Cuomo, A.; Di Modica, G.; Distefano, S.; et al. (2013). 'An SLA-based Broker for Cloud Infrastructures'. Journal of Grid Computing. 11 (March 2013): 1–25. doi:10.1007/s10723-012-9241-4.
16. ^Kyriazis, D., ed. (June 2013). 'Cloud Computing Service Level Agreements - Exploitation of Research Results'. European Commission. p. 51. Retrieved 22 June 2016.
17. ^Curtis, B.; Herron, D.; Subramanyam, J. (July 2015). 'Using Software Measurement in SLAs: Integrating CISQ Size and Structural Quality Measures into Contractual Relationships'(PDF). CISQ. Retrieved 22 June 2016.

External links[edit]

• Service Level Agreement (SLA) S-Cube Knowledge Model