Elasticity Economics of Cloud-Based Applications

Abstract

Cloud infrastructure services offer elastic computing resources that particularly match the requirements of web transactional applications. Such applications, e.g., e-business applications, have high business value and variable workload patterns and therefore utilizing such elastic cloud resources in a cost-effective way is crucial need for cloud consumers. Defining economic elasticity rules, however, is not trivial as it requires (i) running considerable number of experiments with different parameters/metrics and workloads (ii) collecting appropriate cloud and application cost/performance measurements and (iii) performing cost/performance trade-off analysis. In this paper we introduce our on-going work on elasticity economics platform that supports cloud consumers to achieve the above three requirements. We also discuss the key elements of the elasticity economics platform and our early prototyping experience.