CloudAnalyst: A CloudSim-Based Visual Modeller for Analysing Cloud Computing Environments and Applications

TLDR

Cloud computing has shifted application deployment from fixed, underutilized servers to pay‑per‑use elastic infrastructure, yet developers still lack tools to evaluate large‑scale applications’ geographic distribution across diverse providers. The authors introduce CloudAnalyst to fill this gap by enabling evaluation and modeling of cloud environments and applications. CloudAnalyst simulates large‑scale cloud applications to study their behavior under different deployment configurations. Using CloudAnalyst, developers gain insights into optimal application distribution across cloud infrastructures and performance optimization via service brokers.

Abstract

Advances in Cloud computing opens up many new possibilities for Internet applications developers. Previously, a main concern of Internet applications developers was deployment and hosting of applications, because it required acquisition of a server with a fixed capacity able to handle the expected application peak demand and the installation and maintenance of the whole software infrastructure of the platform supporting the application. Furthermore, server was underutilized because peak traffic happens only at specific times. With the advent of the Cloud, deployment and hosting became cheaper and easier with the use of pay-peruse flexible elastic infrastructure services offered by Cloud providers. Because several Cloud providers are available, each one offering different pricing models and located in different geographic regions, a new concern of application developers is selecting providers and data center locations for applications. However, there is a lack of tools that enable developers to evaluate requirements of large-scale Cloud applications in terms of geographic distribution of both computing servers and user workloads. To fill this gap in tools for evaluation and modeling of Cloud environments and applications, we propose CloudAnalyst. It was developed to simulate large-scale Cloud applications with the purpose of studying the behavior of such applications under various deployment configurations. CloudAnalyst helps developers with insights in how to distribute applications among Cloud infrastructures and value added services such as optimization of applications performance and providers incoming with the use of Service Brokers.