A Brokerage-Based Approach for Cloud Service Selection

The expanding Cloud computing services offer great opportunities for consumers to find the best service and best pricing, which however raises new challenges on how to select the best service out of the huge pool. It is time-consuming for consumers to collect the necessary information and analyze all service providers to make the decision. This is also a highly demanding task from a computational perspective, because the same computations may be conducted repeatedly by multiple consumers who have similar requirements. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel brokerage-based architecture in the Cloud, where the Cloud brokers is responsible for the service selection. In particular, we design a unique indexing technique for managing the information of a large number of Cloud service providers. We then develop efficient service selection algorithms that rank potential service providers and aggregate them if necessary. We prove the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach through an experimental study with the real and synthetic Cloud data.

I. Introduction

Cloud services offer an elastic and scalable IT task force in terms of storage space and computing capabilities which are essential to most business owners, especially small and medium sized businesses [22]. While this has fueled the large growth in Cloud services, the growing number of Cloud services make it difficult for the potential users to weigh and decide which options suit their requirements the best. There is clearly a need of an additional computing layer on top the base service provisioning to enable tasks such as discovery, mediation, and monitoring. This additional layer of computing is referred to as a brokerage system.