With the increased usage of cloud computing in production environments, both for scientific workflows and industrial applications, the focus of application providers shifts towards service cost optimisation. One of the ways to achieve minimised service execution cost is to optimise the placement of the service in the resource pool of the cloud data centres. An increasing number of research approaches is focusing on using machine learning algorithms to deal with dynamic cloud workloads by allocating resources to services in an adaptive way. Many of such solutions are intended for cloud infrastructure providers and deal only with specific types of cloud services. In this paper, we present a model-based approach aimed at the providers of applications hosted in the cloud, which is applicable in early phases of the service lifecycle and can be used for any cloud application service. Using several machine learning methods, we create models to predict cloud service cost and response times of two cloud applications. We also explore how to extract knowledge about the effect that the cloud application context has on both service cost and quality of service so that the gained knowledge can be used in the service placement decision process. The experimental results demonstrate the ability of providing relevant information about the impact of cloud application context parameters on service cost and quality of service. The results also indicate the relevance of our approach for applications in preproduction phase since application providers can gain useful insights regarding service placement decision without acquiring extensive training datasets.
Model-Based Extraction of Knowledge about the Effect of Cloud Application Context on Application Service Cost and Quality of Service