Cost-effective deployment of certified cloud composite services

Abstract The advent of cloud computing has radically changed the concept of distributed environments, where services can now be composed and reused at high rates. Today, service composition in the cloud is driven by the need of providing stable QoS, where non-functional properties of composite services are proven over time and composite services continuously adapt to both functional and non-functional changes of the component services. This scenario introduces substantial costs on the cloud providers that go beyond the cost of deploying component services, and require to consider the costs of continuously verifying non-functional properties of composite and component services. In this paper, we propose a cost-effective approach to certification-based cloud service composition. This approach is based, on one side, on a portable certification process for the cloud evaluating non-functional properties of composite services and, on the other side, on a cost-evaluation methodology aimed to produce the service composition that minimizes the total cost paid by the cloud providers, taking into account both deployment and certification/verification costs. Our service composition approach is driven by certificates awarded to single services and by a fuzzy-based cost evaluation methodology, and assumes certified properties as must-have requirements for service selection and composition.