Cloud brokering mechanisms for optimized placement of virtual machines across multiple providers

In the past few years, we have witnessed the proliferation of a heterogeneous ecosystem of cloud providers, each one with a different infrastructure offer and pricing policy. We explore this heterogeneity in a novel cloud brokering approach that optimizes placement of virtual infrastructures across multiple clouds and also abstracts the deployment and management of infrastructure components in these clouds. The feasibility of our approach is evaluated in a high throughput computing cluster case study. Experimental results confirm that multi-cloud deployment provides better performance and lower costs compared to the usage of a single cloud only. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.