An ant colony algorithm-based approach for cost-effective data hosting with high availability in multi-cloud environments

Abstract

In this age of information, data plays an increasingly important role. Nowadays, with the development and popularization of cloud computing, more and more enterprises and personal users choose to put their applications and data into the cloud. However, most of them tend to use single cloud because of convenience and cheap storage price in the short term. This may lead to some challenges and risks, such as vendor lock-in, data low-availability, and data privacy risks. Recently, multi-cloud has attracted considerable interests. In this paper, an ant colony algorithm-based approach is proposed for data hosting in multi-cloud environments, which is subjected to optimization objectives including cost and availability. Extensive experiments are performed to evaluate the proposed method, which are driven by real-world cloud services information.