Simulation-Based Performance Evaluation of Cloud Applications

As the cloud paradigm gains widespread adoption, performance evaluation and prediction of applications remain daunting tasks that have not yet been fully accomplished. Nevertheless, reliable performance numbers are the key to take the cloud to the next step, in which it will be possible to predict the maintenance cost of the applications and to introduce richer Service Level Agreement between the service provider and consumer. In this paper we propose a methodology based on both benchmarking and simulation which aims at predicting the performance of cloud applications developed trough the mOSAIC framework. The methodology is general enough to be of interest to other component-based cloud application development platforms which are emerging in these days.