Increasingly infrastructure providers are supplying the cloud marketplace with storage and on-demand compute resources to host cloud applications. From an application user's point of view, it is desirable to identify the most appropriate set of available resources on which to execute an application. Resource choice can be complex and may involve comparing available hardware specifications, operating systems, value-added services (such as network configuration or data replication) and operating costs (such as hosting cost and data throughput). Providers' cost models often change and new commodity cost models (such as spot pricing) can offer significant savings. In this paper, a software abstraction layer is used to discover the most appropriate infrastructure resources for a given application, by applying a two-phase constraints-based approach to a multi-provider cloud environment. In the first phase, a set of possible infrastructure resources is identified for the application. In the second phase, a suitable heuristic is used to select the most appropriate resources from the initial set. For some applications a cost-based heuristic may be most appropriate; for others a performance-based heuristic may be of greater relevance. A financial services application and a high performance computing application are used to illustrate the execution of the proposed resource discovery mechanism. The experimental results show that the proposed model can dynamically select appropriate resouces for an application's requirements.
Cloud Computing has created a paradigm shift in software development. Many developers now use the Cloud as an affordable platform on which to deploy business solutions. One outstanding challenge is the integration of different Cloud services (or resources), offered by different Cloud providers, when building a Cloud-oriented business solution.Typically each provider has a different means of describing Cloud resources and uses a different application programming interface to acquire Cloud resources. Developers need to make complex decisions involving multiple Cloud products, different Cloud implementations, different deployment options, and different programming approaches. In this paper, we propose a model for discovering Cloud resources in a multi-provider environment. We study a financial use case scenario and suggest the use of a provider-agnostic approach which hides the complex implementation details for mapping the application requirements to Cloud resources.
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