A cloud service provider strives to effectively provide a high Quality of Service (QoS) to client jobs. Such
jobs vary in computational and Service-Level-Agreement (SLA) obligations, as well as differ with respect
to tolerating delays and SLA violations. The job scheduling plays a critical role in servicing cloud demands
by allocating appropriate resources to execute client jobs. The response to such jobs is optimized by the
cloud service provider on a multi-tier cloud computing environment. Typically, the complex and dynamic
nature of multi-tier environments incurs difficulties in meeting such demands, because tiers are dependent
on each others which in turn makes bottlenecks of a tier shift to escalate in subsequent tiers. However,
the optimization process of existing approaches produces single-tier-driven schedules that do not employ
the differential impact of SLA violations in executing client jobs. Furthermore, the impact of schedules
optimized at the tier level on the performance of schedules formulated in subsequent tiers tends to be
ignored, resulting in a less than optimal performance when measured at the multi-tier level. Thus, failing in
committing job obligations incurs SLA penalties that often take the form of either financial compensations,
or losing future interests and motivations of unsatisfied clients in the service provided. Therefore, tolerating the risk of such delays on the operational performance of a cloud service provider is vital to meet SLA expectations and mitigate their associated commercial penalties. Such situations demand the cloud service provider to employ scalable service mechanisms that efficiently manage the execution of resource loads in accordance to their financial influence on the system performance, so as to ensure system reliability and cost reduction. In this paper, a scheduling and allocation approach is proposed to formulate schedules that account for differential impacts of SLA violation penalties and, thus,