Optimal autonomic management of service-based business processes in the cloud

Cloud computing is an emerging paradigm that provides hardware, platform and software resources as services based on pay-as-you-go model. It is being increasingly used for hosting and executing service-based business processes. However, business processes are subject to dynamic evolution during their life-cycle due to the highly dynamic evolution of the cloud environment. Therefore, to efficiently manage them according to the autonomic computing paradigm, service-based business processes can be associated with autonomic managers. Autonomic managers monitor these processes, analyze monitoring data, plan configuration actions, and execute these actions on these processes. The main objective of cloud computing is to improve the performance level while minimizing operating costs. Thus, due to the diversity of business processes requirements and the heterogeneity of cloud resources, discovering the optimal management cost of a business process in the cloud becomes a highly challenging problem. For this purpose, we propose an approach based on an Integer Linear Program to find out the optimal allocation of cloud resources that meet customers’ requirements and resources’ constraints. Besides, to validate our approach under realistic conditions and inputs, we propose an extension of the CloudSim simulator to analyze the cloud resources consumed by an autonomic business process. Experiments conducted on two real datasets highlight the effectiveness and performance of our approach.