An Approach to Estimating Cost of Running Cloud Applications Based on AWS

Estimating the cost is important for cloud application developers to services in clouds, and becomes even important when it needs remaining a certain service level at the same time. Though currently much work has been down to predict cost and performance of cloud applications, most of them perform either before application design or after the application construction, which leads to either imprecise estimation or irreparable design fault. In this paper, we propose an approach to estimate the cost of running typical applications in Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud during design phase. We propose an UML Activity-extended model (AeModel) to describe execution of application service and introduce an extraction algorithm to extract information contained in the AeModel automatically. We propose a cost model on AWS, which can help developers to estimate operating cost during design phase and satisfy performance needs, with an algorithm to produce suitable purchase solutions automatically. We perform case studies using a web-based business application to show effectiveness of our approach, and find that our approach can help developers lessen cost by adjusting application models.