CDOSim: Simulating cloud deployment options for software migration support

Abstract

The evaluation of competing cloud deployment options (CDOs) forms a major challenge when migrating software systems to cloud environments. For example, there exists a plethora of potential cloud provider candidates, components must be mapped to suitable virtual machine instances, and, to exploit elasticity, appropriate runtime adaptation strategies for specific usage profiles have to be defined. But analyzing potential CDOs manually is intractable, costly, and time-consuming due to the heterogeneity of the cloud environments and the overall combinatorial design space complexity. We present the simulation tool CDOSim that can simulate cost and performance properties of those CDOs. It builds upon and significantly extends the cloud simulator CloudSim and integrates into our cloud migration framework CloudMIG. Additionally, we created a cloud benchmark to augment CloudMIG's cloud environment models with provider-specific performance characteristics. Along with this simulation input, CDOSim utilizes reverse-engineered architectural models and can employ actual monitored workload. We report on extensive experiments incorporating Eucalyptus and Amazon EC2 which show that CDOSim can sufficiently accurate predict the cost and performance properties of CDOs.