Business Level Objectives of Customer for Autonomous Cloud Service Negotiation

A cloud service customer that has special QoS requirements may start negotiation process with the service providers. In negotiation, strategies are important to satisfy own needs, beating the competition and ensure successful negotiation. Business Level Objectives (BLOs) are important strategy metrics to achieve organization’s business goals in negotiation. Studies indicated that BLOs of cloud providers have been proposed for autonomous agent-based cloud service negotiation mechanism. However, the cloud customers’ BLOs are still limited and not been given attention. Hence, this paper proposed three BLOs with eight different policies for cloud service customers. First, the existing BLOs in cloud service negotiations were investigated. Second, the negotiation protocols, negotiation parameters and negotiation goals of the cloud customers were investigated. Based on the investigations, the double auction protocol was selected as a suitable protocol for cloud service negotiation. Then, the BLOs and its policies were proposed and presented. The proposed BLOs and policies are useful in autonomous negotiation, especially to reduce the cloud adoption cost.