Bi-objective optimization of availability and cost for cloud services

Abstract

Cloud-based services are a current approach for developing large-scale applications with advantages such as flexibility, access to on-demand resources, and business agility. The overall application functionality results from complex interactions of many decoupled services, each having its operational specificity. Due to this complexity, the manual configuration of these systems is very arduous, error-prone and likely to impair the quality of service, leading to malfunctioning services, lowering availability and accruing costs. Identifying the optimal solution to simultaneously optimize availability and costs, whilst meeting service level objectives remains a challenge for professionals developing solutions using cloud services. This paper proposes a mathematical formulation of a bi-objective problem to identify the optimal set of solutions for the system configuration. Empirical evaluation of the proposed approach in a case study of a real industrial scenario results in an R-Squared of 0.85, an MSE of 0.021 and an optimization accuracy of 0.928. These methods can help practitioners to keep services at an optimum configuration enabling autonomic service operation, whilst improving availability and cost.