Creation Phase. A SLA is first created when a customer subscribes to a service that is offered by a service provider organization. A (possibly complex) chain of events leads to the point where the customer wants to subscribe to the service. The customer first has found out about the existence of the service offering, and has gathered enough detailed information about this offering to judge if it is a service that he wants. The customer might have been actively searching for a service offering to fit a given customer need that exists. Another possibility is that the customer was not actually searching for a service of- fering, but got to know about it through unsolicited advertisements, word of mouth, or via some other means. SLA creation involves a number of activities: • Officially (this is, legally binding) establishment of the agreement. This reflects that the cus- tomer has actually subscribed to the service, is aware of the detailed, legally binding extent of what is comprised in the service delivery, has copies of all relevant information about the ser- vice, etc. In this step the customer signs a service delivery contract. • All required Service subsystems need to be configured to accommodate this new service sub- scription. So this includes access authorization systems for the service, entries into billing sys- tems, entries into the service logic of the service, reservations of required, per-customer service resources, etc. SLA creations are probably also input to longer term resource planning activities for the service pro- vider as a whole.
Creation Phase. Figure 2.2 starts the creation phase of an SLA with the development of an SLA template, describing the service, which is then used to advertise the service and match with potential clients. These SLA Advertisement and SLA Matchmaking steps correspond with the purpose of the Discover Service Provider step from Figure 2.1. Once a client and service provider decide to collaborate, the service terms of the agreement have to be identified and negotiated, which corresponds to the SLA Definition step from from Figure 2.1 and the Negotiation step from Figure 2.2. The final step of the create phase of Figure 2.1 is Establish SLA. In this step, the SLA template is filled in to form a specific agreement, and both parties commit to it [14]. In the corresponding step, Agreement & Deployment from Figure 2.2 the SLA template from its first step is used instead. Both steps include the deployment and configuration of the services and monitoring as agreed upon in the SLA.
