Re: [soa-rm-ra] Groups - Modification of Policy_Contract_Business diagram (OASIS_Policy-Contract_Diagram.JPG) uploaded

[Francis McCabe <frankmccabe@mac.com>]

Again, I need to get completely clear on something:

It is *not* reasonable to state:

Contract is not only more than a Policy but also more than a SLA

In some limited areas, you may constrain SLAs to focus on things like  
bandwidth etc., but other businesses will use SLAs to govern things  
like business opening hours, response times for service and so on.

So, again, I do not yet see a particularly strong case for  
distinguishing SLAs from contracts.

Certainly for our architecture we need to be as encompassing as  
required to support business via services, not simply to build yet  
another IT infrastructure.

Frank

On May 5, 2007, at 10:53 AM, michael.poulin@uk.fid-intl.com wrote:

> I have a strong impression that in our March discussion about  
> Contract & Policies we  have agreed that Contract is not only more  
> than a Policy but also more than a SLA. The SLA is explicitly  
> measurable (run-time) set of service attributes/characteristics/ 
> actions while a Contract can contain Commitments of the contract  
> participants that 1) are not visible through the service interface;  
> 2) may be not measured at run-time. I guess, it is the time for me  
> to show my version of a Service Contract Template we are discussing  
> in my organisation ( I will be able to do it not earlier than on  
> Tuesday next week).
>
> I have described an example of such contract  in my article "Does  
> Web Services makes a Service for SOA?" In particular, a service  
> provider was obliged to gather audit info on all actions requested  
> by particular client and failed in it because its database was not  
> available for some time and several audit messages got lost.
> If we are building high level RA, we cannot discard the scenario  
> I've just described.
> That is, Contract is an agreed container of all service related  
> actions performed by the provider's SW system(s). With such  
> definition, I do know what to do in IT with Service Contract.
>
> Nevertheless, I am still unclear on Contract-Policy relationship  
> issue...
>
> - Michael