A Mathematical Programming Approach for Cloud Service Brokerage

Cloud computing is fast becoming the wave of the future for both home and business computing. Because of this growing acceptance, we can expect an explosion of diverse cloud service providers in the coming years. However, the cloud is not a single entity, rather it is a set of many disconnected islands of application (SaaS), infrastructure (IaaS), and different platform (PaaS) services. Cloud brokering mechanisms are essential to transform the heterogeneous cloud market into a commodity-like service. Cloud service brokers (CSBs) are the new form of business entities to help to aggregate the scattered set of cloud services and make conveniently available to their diverse users. CSBs can reserve a certain percentage of their clients’ (users’) demand and satisfy the remaining portion in an on-demand basis. In doing so, they need to minimize cost of both reserved and on-demand instances as well as the distance of a link between the cloud service provider (CSP) and the user. The study proposes a reservation approach with a mixed integer model to optimizes the cloud service cost and quality.