Enabling cost-efficient Software Service Distribution in infrastructure clouds at run time

Because Infrastructure as a Service in the form of virtual machines only provides a limited supply of resources per discrete instance, approaches are required to compute cost-efficient distribution strategies for Software as a Service instances. Due to its computational complexity, this Software Service Distribution Problem is difficult to address at run time where time constraints apply. In the work at hand, we propose a Knapsack-based heuristic approach; an extensive evaluation, based on data from actual cloud systems and software services, shows that the heuristic is able to solve the problem with more than 99.7 % reduction in computation time and only marginal degradation in solution quality compared to a locally optimal approach. Thus, through the minimization of infrastructure leasing costs, our proposed approach enables Software as a Service providers to achieve higher profit margins or more competitive pricing of their services in the market.