SLA Management in Intent-Driven Service Management Systems: A Taxonomy and Future Directions

Traditional, slow and error-prone human-driven methods to configure and manage Internet service requests are proving unsatisfactory. This is due to an increase in Internet applications with stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements. Which demands faster and fault-free service deployment with minimal or without human intervention. With this aim, intent-driven service management (IDSM) has emerged, where users express their service level agreement (SLA) requirements in a declarative manner as intents. With the help of closed control-loop operations, IDSM performs service configurations and deployments, autonomously to fulfill the intents. This results in a faster deployment of services and reduction in configuration errors caused by manual operations, which in turn reduces the SLA violations. This article is an attempt to provide a systematic review of How the IDSM systems manage and fulfill the SLA requirements specified as intents. As an outcome, the review identifies four intent management activities, which are performed in a closed-loop manner. For each activity, a taxonomy is proposed and used to compare the existing techniques for SLA management in IDSM systems. A critical analysis of all the considered research articles in the review and future research directions are presented in the conclusion.