TR178 Enabling End-to-End Cloud SLA Management V2.0.2

This Technical Report (TR178), while organized by the TM Forum, takes an outside-in look by reviewing existing relevant industry work (DMTF, OGF, NIST, CSMIC, ITU-T, ISMA, OASIS and other), then compared with the best practices from the TM Forum SLA management Handbook [TMF GB917] which has been developed over the last decade for the communication service providers. It then recommends a set of business considerations, architecture design principles and standards that are required for managing SLA end-to-end in this highly dynamic Cloud ecosystem.

The various SLA related standards and best practices existing today need to be integrated and augmented. The purpose of this document is to first demystify the processes and methodologies to establish Cloud Service Level Agreement (SLA) based on a collection of best practices and to identify interoperable standards required to facilitate end-to-end Cloud SLA management to support this complex Cloud ecosystem.

The first issue of this document (TR178) was published in November 2012; this is the second issue and it is part of the TM Forum Frameworx Release 14.

Major additions in this issue include:

• Analysis of intermediary roles such as Cloud Business Broker and Technical Broker, and their associated SLA
• processes and use cases
• Extensions of the TM Forum Information Model (SID) for Cloud SLA
• Standards recommendation for enabling E2E Cloud SLA management
• Cloud SLA glossary to be shared among SDOs.