resources, and network connectivity, while continually
meeting QoS and regulatory constraints. Current
solutions for adaptive Web services and adaptive
service-based business processes fall short to support
essential characteristics of such applications. The
highly rapid and unforeseen adaptive nature of these
applications with their complex and distributed nature
may indirectly affect various layers and components of
the cloud stack (i.e., SaaS, PaaS and IaaS). This puts a
significant emphasis on the monitoring of SLAs, as
well as detecting, predicting and resisting to violations,
which appear to be more challenging in the case of
CSBAs as various providers are dynamically involved.
In the literature, there are two main approaches for
systems monitoring, i.e., reactive and proactive. The
reactive approach mainly reacts after an occurrence of a
violation has occurred. While the proactive approach is
more preventive, by possibly predicting potential future
violations before their occurrence, and by reacting to
avoid their occurrence.
The contributions of this paper are twofold: (i)
we present a novel monitoring framework for
CSBA, namely Proactive learning from SLA
violation, based on MAPE-K
1
adaptation loop, and
(ii) we concretely address the ‘Analysis’ component
of the proposed framework. This novel proactive
learning approach takes advantage of the massive
amount of past process execution data in order to
predict potential violations. It identifies the best
counter measures that need to be applied. As a
proof-of-concept of the proposed approach, a
prototype has been developed that ascertains the
applicability and feasibility of the proposed solution.
The rest of this paper is structured as follows.
Section 2 discusses related work. Section 3 introduces
a running scenario that will be used throughout the
paper. Section 4 lays the background needed to
understand the work proposed in this paper. The
proposed predictive monitoring framework is
presented in Section 5. Section 6 presents our
proposed SLA violations learning approach. Section
7discusses the implementation of the proposed
approach on a real-life log. Finally, Section 8 draws
conclusions and perspectives.
2 LITERATURE REVIEW
There is a massive amount of work in the literature
related to cloud-based environment, covering
1
MAPE-K (Monitoring, Analysis, Planning Execution-
Knowledge).
various aspects of this multi-disciplinary domain. In
the next discussion, we are focusing on prominent
efforts in the area of SLA monitoring and
management in CBSA, which is appraised against
the work proposed in this paper.and.
In principle, approaches for monitoring and
detecting SLA violations with respect to QoS
constraints are mainly based on techniques and
strategies to adapt QoS settings according to changes
and violations detected during execution of CSBA.
In this case QoS parameters are generally used to
repair and optimize a web service. Generally, these
adaptive approaches are based on the ability to select
and replace the failed services dynamically at
runtime or during deployment. The selection is
governed not only by the need to substitute services
but to optimize the requirements of QoS of the
system. Accordingly, the system must autonomously
adapt itself in order to improve the quality of service
of the process. In (Tao et al., 2014) proposed a novel
hybrid and adaptive multi learners approach for
online QoS modeling in the cloud; they described an
adaptive solution that dynamically selects the best
learning algorithm for prediction (Leitner et al.,
2011). The proposals in (Fugini et al. 2010) and
(Schmieders et al., 2011) address the problem of
violation detection and adaptation of SLA contracts
between several layers. For example, (Fugini et al.,
2010) proposed a methodology to create, monitor
and adapt the inter-layer SLA contracts. The SLA
model includes parameters such as KPI (key
performance indicators), KGI (indicators key
objectives), and metrics infrastructure. (Schmieders et
al., 2011) proposed a solution to avoid SLA violations
by applying inter-layer techniques. The proposed
approach uses three layers for the prediction of SLA
violations. The identification of adaptation needs is
based on the prediction of QoS, which uses
assumptions about the characteristics of the execution
context. In (Vincent et al., 2015), the authors
introduced a Cloud Application and SLA monitoring
architecture, and proposed two methods for
determining the frequency these applications need to
monitor, they also identified the challenges in regard
with application provisioning and SLA enforcement,
especially in multi-tenant Cloud services.
Discussion: The main limitation of the
aforementioned approaches is that they only
consider certain services regions (execution points)
of the composition and do not consider all process
tasks. Most of the works targeting SLA violations
prediction is addressing grid environments or
service-oriented infrastructure that differs from
cloud infrastructure, therefore the applicability of