CloudGuide: Helping users estimate cloud deployment cost and performance for legacy web applications

With cloud business growing, many companies are joining the market as cloud service providers. Most providers offer similar services with slightly different pricing models, and performance data remains scarce. This leaves cloud users with the puzzle of guessing what costs they will need to pay to run their legacy applications in a cloud environment. Cloud Guide is a tool suite that provides users with an estimated cost of running a legacy application on various cloud providers based on specific performance requirements. CloudGuide predicts the cloud computing resources required by a targeted application based on a queuing model and estimates the deployment cost for the application. CloudGuide allows users to explore cloud configurations that meet different performance requirements and cost constraints, and can be used to find new configuration when workload changes. The experiments presented in this study evaluated a multi-tiered network application and showed that CloudGuide can choose high-quality cloud configuration and can be used to assist system administrators with dynamic provisioning decisions.