OpenSim: A Simulator of OpenStack Services

Cloud Computing is still an emerging field experiencing rapid advancement in both industry and academia. Cloud computing has solved many problems initially faced by internet application developers such as acquisition of a server with a fixed capacity to handle expected peak application demand which led to under-utilization of provisioned resources, by enabling a new consumption and delivery model for IT services. It involves provisioning of dynamically scalable and virtualized resources as a service over the Internet. Evaluation of algorithms and policies in an exhaustive manner directly on a cloud is infeasible as it involves a lot of time and effort. Moreover, utilization of real cloud infrastructure limits the experiment to the scale of the infrastructure. A desirable alternative would be utilization of simulation tools that enables evaluation of a hypothesis in a repeatable, controlled and timely manner prior to software development in a cloud environment. Taking into consideration these issues and the ever-growing popularity of OpenStack, in this paper we propose OpenSim a simulator of OpenStack services. It has been developed by the authors of this paper with the intention of simulating new algorithms and also to enable a user to study the behavior of an application running under various deployment configuration in an OpenStack environment.