Patent ID: 8140666

Claim:
A method of provisioning one or more resources in a distributed computing network to ensure compliance with a service level agreement associated with a computer application, the method comprising the steps of: monitoring network performance between a local administrative domain and one or more cooperating administrative domains connected to the local administrative domain by network paths, wherein the local administrative domain and at least one or more of the cooperating administrative domains have a separate set of administrative policies by which resources of that administrative domain operate; identifying a present or predicted violation of the service level agreement based on at least a portion of results of the monitoring step, wherein the service level agreement specifies performance and availability metrics for provisioning network resources required for network connectivity between multiple administrative domains and wherein the service level agreement specifies performance and availability metrics for provisioning network resources required for network connectivity between an application executing across the local and cooperating administrative domains and a client in the local administrative domain accessing the application; selecting one or more cooperating administrative domains that can effect compliance with the service level agreement by instantiating one or more network resources within at least one of the selected cooperating administrative domains in response to a request from the local administrative domain, the one or more network resources being network elements that enable communication between computational resources of the distributed computing network, wherein the one or more network resources includes one of a network switch and a firewall; and causing reconfiguration of the local administrative domain to allow the computer application to make use of the one or more newly instantiated network resources within the selected cooperating administrative domain; wherein the local administrative domain reconfiguring step further comprises instructing a request router to direct one or more client requests to the selected cooperating administrative domain; and wherein the computer application is one of a transactional application and a parallel application.