Section: New Results

Identification and Selection of Services from Cloud Providers

Participants : Anis Ahmed Nacer, François Charoy, Olivier Perrin.

We continued our work on providing a framework to compare plans for services from cloud providers in order to help architects to select the best composition given the required criteria (both both functional and non-functional requirements) for an application. This year, we have made progress in two directions: the first is how to identify the key elements to be considered when architects want to compare the different plans, and the second one is a methodology to compute the best composition, given partial information provided in service description (based on the WOWA method ).

In order to gather the key elements of the comparison that met the architects’ requirements and the relationship between these key elements of the comparison, we reviewed the service providers’ plans and previous works on benchmarks. Finally, to ensure that the list of key elements of the comparison and their relationship was complete for the service selection process, we conducted an empirical study with the architects.

Regarding the second part, we use the WOWA (Weighted Ordered Weighted Averaging) operator to solve this decision problem. This operator provides an aggregation function that uses both the simultaneous advantage of the OWA method to allow compensation between high and low values and the weighted average method to consider the importance of the suppliers who provide the information. WOWA uses two sets of weights: one corresponds to source significance, and the other corresponds to value significance.

Our evaluations are encouraging, and we are now ready to submit our proposals to conferences.