A utility-based approach for customised cloud service selection

The fact that cloud computing is widely accepted results in an increasing number of cloud providers. Customers are now burdened with the task of deciding which provider to choose for serving their requirements. This work developed a broker-based framework capable of automatically selecting cloud services based on user-defined requirement parameters and the service level agreement (SLA) attributes of the cloud providers. The goal is to help customers make clever decisions to achieve their best benefit. The framework contains components for decision making, cloud monitoring, user authentication, cloud access and SLA management. More specifically, we developed a utility-based, dynamic and flexible matching algorithm capable of maximising the users' profits. The matching algorithms as well as the entire framework were evaluated using a realistic simulation environment. Experimental results show that our utility-based approach performs well in terms of the matching quality and cost-saving.