Using simulations to assess the stability and capacity of cloud computing systems

For applications hosted in a cloud computing system, where there are many servers to handle incoming invocations of the application, the assessment of stability of the cloud is very important for both the planning of new applications and the expansion of existing applications. However, a general assessment is always hard to achieve as there are still no standard definitions of techniques used in cloud computing and an actual cloud computing system could be very large and complex. This paper presents a simulation for a cloud computing environment. It enables an assessment of the cloud's logical stability under various configurations without performing experiments on the actual cloud environment. The correctness of the simulation is verified by the theoretical calculation results of the well known M/M/1 queuing system.