Towards Elasticity for SME Cloud Services

High availability and performance are metrics that directly impact the Quality of Experience of cloud service customers. On these environments, several models of elasticity have been used to meet seasonal demands, from the acquisition of additional resources to the expansion of private clouds to hybrid clouds. However, both scenarios are burdensome for Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs). In this article, we present a strategy for elasticity management using existing and idle resources from the enterprise itself, which may be underutilized precisely during the period of applications' higher demand. In order to evaluate our solution, tests were carried out in the CloudSim simulator using typical scale-out applications on a dynamic cloud infrastructure, taking into account response time as a performance metric. Besides the empirical experiments, we also analyzed the scalability of our approach with the CloudSim simulator. Results of our evaluations demonstrated that our strategy is able to improve applications performance in up to 75%.