A hybrid approach to automatic IaaS service selection

Cloud computing provides on-demand resources and removes the boundaries of resources' physical locations. By providing virtualized computing resources in an elastic manner over the internet, IaaS providers allow organizations to save upfront infrastructure costs and focus on features that discriminate their businesses. The growing number of providers makes manual selection of the most suitable configuration of IaaS resources, or IaaS services, difficult and time consuming while requiring a high level of expertise. In our previous paper we proposed QuARAM recommender, a general platform for automatic IaaS service selection. In this paper, we present in detail the hybrid approach to automatic service selection used in our platform. The selection process begins with automatic extraction of an application's features, requirements and preferences, which are then used to produce a list of potential services for the application's deployment. We use case-based reasoning and MCDM (Multi-criteria Decision Making) to provide a recommendation of suitable services for application deployment, clustering to handle the problem of a large search space and a service consolidation method to improve the resource utilization and decrease the total service price. We carry out a case study with a prototype implementation of our platform to demonstrate that automatic IaaS service selection using a combination of all the proposed approaches is both practical and achievable.