An Architecture for Evaluating Distributed Application Deployments in Multi-clouds

In this paper we present an architecture for the modeling, collection, and evaluation of long-term histories of deployments of distributed multi-tier applications on federations of Clouds (Multi-Clouds). Our goal is to capture several aspects of application development and deployment lifecycle, including the evolving application structure, requirements, goals, and service level objectives, application deployment descriptions, runtime monitoring, and quality control, Cloud provider characteristics, and to provide a Cloud-independent resource classification scheme that is a key to reasoning about Multi-Cloud deployments of complex large-scale applications. Since our target is capturing the continuous evolution of applications and their deployments over time, we ensure that our metadata model is designed to optimize space usage. Additionally, we demonstrate that using the model and data collections over varying deployments of an application (using the SPEC jEnterprise2010 distributed benchmark as a case study) one can answer important questions about which deployment options work best in terms of performance, reliability, cost, and combinations thereof.