Performance and Cost Modeling Strategy for Cloud Infrastructure Planning

Cloud computing is a computational paradigm in which resources such as storage, applications and networking infrastructures can be offered as services over the internet. Due to dynamic and virtualized nature of cloud environments and diversity of client requests, providing the expected service quality while avoiding over-provisioning is not a simple task. To ensure that the provisioned service is acceptable, providers must exploit techniques and mechanisms that guarantee a minimum level of service quality. This performance evaluation of cloud infrastructures has been receiving considerable attention by providers as a prominent activity for improving service quality. This paper presents a modeling strategy for cloud infrastructure planning with different software and hardware configurations, according to performance and cost requirements. A case study based on Moodle hosted on Eucalyptus platform is adopted to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed modeling strategy.