Benchmarks to Compare Cloud Service Providers for Seamless Customer Migration

The paper advocates a seamless cloud abstraction to enable the mobility of clients: i.e., a cloud that appears to offer the same service-level properties despite the heterogeneous nature and geographic location of the cloud providers. The paper concretely defines the service attributes experienced by a client application: such as availability, elasticity, resilience, and mobility, in terms of the cloud infrastructure parameters (i.e., VM instances and network bandwidth). Since the IaaS parameters are hard to measure directly, we map the client-visible SaaS-layer attributes onto the IaaS parameters of the CSP. The paper describes SaaS layer measurements of an image data service on the PlanetLab, as an instance of seamless cloud.