Cost/Performance Evaluation for Cloud Applications Using Simulation

The pay-per-use business model is one of the key factors for the success of the cloud computing paradigm: resources are acquired only when needed and charged on the basis of their actual usage. The execution of applications in the cloud implies costs that depend on the usage of the leased resources and on the resource pricing model adopted by the providers. This paper presents a technique to evaluate the trade-off between costs and performance of cloud applications through the use of benchmarks and simulation. Given a mOSAIC cloud application, it is possible to predict performance indexes and resource consumption under generic workloads. This makes it possible to choose the deployment on the resources of the provider that guarantees the desired performance levels and minimizes the costs for executing the application.