Towards Realistic Simulations of Arbitrary Cross-Cloud Workloads

Abstract

The research undertakings in cloud computing often require designing new algorithms, techniques, and solutions requiring large-scale cloud deployments for comprehensive evaluation. Simulations make a powerful and cost-effective tool for testing, evaluation, and repeated experimentation for new cloud algorithms. Unfortunately, even though cloud federation and hybrid cloud simulations are explored in the literature, Cross-Cloud simulations are still largely an unsupported feature in most popular cloud simulation frameworks. In this paper, we present a Cross-Cloud simulation framework, which makes it possible to test scheduling and reasoning algorithms on Cross-Cloud deployments with arbitrary workload. The support of Cross-Cloud simulations, where individual application components are allowed to be deployed on different cloud platforms, can be a valuable asset in selecting appropriate mixture of cloud services for the applications. We also implement a Cross-Cloud aware reasoner using our Cross-Cloud simulation framework. Simulations using both simple applications and complex multi-stage workflows show that the Cross-Cloud aware reasoner can substantially save cloud usage costs for most multi-component cloud applications.