Optimization of a Cloud Resource Management Problem from a Consumer Perspective

Cloud Computing is a distributed computing paradigm in which computing resources are available to users via Internet. Although there are many works on resource management in related literature, few of them tackle the problem from the perspective of commercial cloud consumers. In this paper, the proposed resource management problem selects cloud resources aiming to reduce the payment cost and the execution time of user applications. In order to solve this problem, an integer programming formulation and a heuristic based on Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) are also introduced. The model and the algorithm were tested over a set of instances constructed from requirements of real applications combined with sets of resources offered by commercial clouds. The obtained results indicate that the presented methods can be an important decision support tool for cloud consumers.