A Novel Approach for Simulation and Analysis of Cloud Data Center Applications

Considering the unprecedented surge in demands and expectations of smart cloud-based services and applications, there is an increasing demand of scalable tools that can effectively evaluate the performance of these services and provide insights for improving their design and implementation. A realistic and accurate emulation platform is a prerequisite for the efficient assessment of smart cloud data centers, and for improving the capability and flexibility of utilizing the vast resources available to smart cloud applications. The platform needs to be scalable and diverse enough to handle out of the box experiments, as well as simple enough for ease of use and management. The overheads incurred to meet these goals directly hamper the performance of a framework. Therefore, mitigation of the overheads adds to the salient features. In this paper, we present a reference model that strives to meet such requirements while addressing overheads. We demonstrate proof of the concept using off-the-shelf software components and present some test cases of the performance results obtained by the implementation of our platform.