Cloud Economics: Principles, Costs, and Benefits

Abstract

This chapter presents: (i) a layered peer-to-peer Cloud provisioning architecture; (ii) a summary of the current state-of-the-art in Cloud provisioning with particular emphasis on service discovery and load-balancing; (iii) a classification of the existing peer-to-peer network management model with focus on extending the DHTs for indexing and managing complex provisioning information; and (iv) the design and implementation of novel, extensible software fabric (Cloud peer) that combines public/private clouds, overlay networking and structured peer-to-peer indexing techniques for supporting scalable and self-managing service discovery and load-balancing in Cloud computing environments. Finally, an experimental evaluation is presented that demonstrates the feasibility of building next generation Cloud provisioning systems based on peer-to-peer network management and information dissemination models. The experimental test-bed has been deployed on a public cloud computing platform, Amazon EC2, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed peer-to-peer Cloud provisioning software fabric.