A Strategy for Performance Evaluation and Modeling of Cloud Computing Services

On-demand services and reduced costs made cloud computing a popular mechanism to provide scalable resources according to the user’s expectations. This paradigm is an important role in business and academic organizations, supporting applications and services deployed based on virtual machines and containers, two different technologies for virtualization. Cloud environments can support workloads generated by several numbers of users, that request the cloud environment to execute transactions and its performance should be evaluated and estimated in order to achieve clients satisfactions when cloud services are offered. This work proposes a performance evaluation strategy composed of a performance model and a methodology for evaluating the performance of services configured in virtual machines and containers in cloud infrastructures. The performance model for the evaluation of virtual machines and containers in cloud infrastructures is based on stochastic Petri nets. A case study in a real public cloud is presented to illustrate the feasibility of the performance evaluation strategy. The case study experiments were performed with virtual machines and containers supporting workloads related to social networks transactions.