Location-Aware and Budget-Constrained Service Deployment for Composite Applications in Multi-Cloud Environment

Enterprise application providers are increasingly moving their workloads to the cloud for technical and economic benefits. Multi-cloud environment makes it possible to orchestrate multiple cloud resources. With the increasing number of available cloud resources provided by multiple cloud providers at different locations with different prices, application providers face the challenge to select proper cloud resources to deploy their applications in the form of a workflow of component service units. Existing studies usually consider minimizing execution time or/and deployment cost. From the perspective of application providers, however, they also pay huge attention to application response time, including particularly network latency between deployed services and users. Meanwhile, application deployment is often subject to stringent budgetary control to ensure financial viability. This article studies a new type of composite application deployment problem that jointly considers both the performance optimization and budget control in multi-cloud at the global scale. To find solutions with minimal response time without running into the risk of over-spending, we propose a hybrid GA-based approach, featuring new design of domain-tailored service clustering, repair algorithm, solution representation, population initialization, and genetic operators. Extensive experiments using the real-world dataset demonstrate that our proposed hybrid GA approach outperforms some recently proposed approaches.