Network-aware impact determination algorithms for service workflow deployment in hybrid clouds

In recent years, many service providers have started migrating their service offerings to cloud infrastructure. Sometimes, parts of the service workflow can however not be moved to cloud environments. This can occur due to client policies, or because some services are linked to physical client-site devices. The result of the migration is then a hybrid cloud environment, where part of the services are executed within the client network, while most of the processing is moved to the cloud. Migration to the cloud enables a more flexible deployment of services, but also increases the strain on underlying networks as most tasks are partially handled in a remote cloud, and no longer just in the local network. An important question that providers must answer before new service workflows are deployed is whether they can provide the workflow with sufficient quality of service, and whether the deployment will impact existing service workflows. In this paper we discuss strategies based on multi-commodity flow problems, a subset of graph flow problems that can be used to determine whether new service workflows can be sufficiently provisioned, and whether the addition of new workflows can negatively impact the performance of existing flows. We evaluate the proposed solution by comparing the performance of three approaches with respect to the number of successful workflows and with respect to their execution speed.