Optimizing the Distribution of Software Services in Infrastructure Clouds

In the public perception, cloud computing is frequently associated with almost unlimited elasticity and scalability of computing capacity. However, Infrastructure as a Service in the form of virtual machines provides limited supplies of virtual resources, due to restrictions of the underlying physical hardware. At the same time, the execution of Software as a Service instances leads to a specific demand for these resources. Based on this observation, I introduce the Software Service Distribution Problem, i.e., the challenge of (cost-)efficiently distributing the execution of software service instances across available cloud infrastructure providers and virtual machine types under resource constraints. I outline my research approach, which aims at the development of optimization algorithms in the context of an integrated Software Service Distribution Broker, and report the progress made to date.