Minimizing Deployment Cost of Cloud-Based Web Application with Guaranteed QoS

Cloud computing provides a reliable and cost- effective setting for deploying large-scale web applications. However, choosing and configuring an appropriate cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), e.g., the appropriate database and computing instances and acceptable service rates, is a daunting task. The task is also challenging when trying to optimize the IaaS for conflicting objectives such as performance and cost. Furthermore, due to lack of understanding of the pricing model and the cloud IaaS, a cloud consumer may pay more than necessary or may not fully utilize the purchased resources. For this reason, we propose an algorithm that suggests the most cost-effective configuration meeting the QoS requirements and budget constraint. In contrast to existing cost optimization proposals, our proposed algorithm maps the minimum requirements of the to- be-deployed web application to deployment costs according to the price model set by cloud providers. The algorithm also considers QoS requirements for different resource types in the cloud, namely, database servers, computing servers, storage, and service rate. The proposed algorithm is evaluated by a series of experiments on a web application with seven different workload scenarios. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in achieving a solution with the minimum deployment cost for each scenario while satisfying all customer's requirements.