Probability-Based Cloud Storage Providers Selection Algorithms with Maximum Availability (2012)

During recent years cloud service providers have successfully provided reliable and flexible resources to cloud users. For example Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) and Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) provides users storage in the cloud. Despite the tremendous efforts cloud service providers have devoted to the availability of their services, the interruption is still inevitable. Therefore just as an Internet service provider will not count on a single network provider, a cloud user should not depend on a single cloud service provider either. However, cloud service providers provide different levels of services. A more costly service is usually more reliable. As a result it is an important and challenging problem to choose among a set of service providers to fit one's need, which could be budget, failure probability, or the amount of data that can survive failure. The goal of this paper is to select cloud service providers in order to maximize the benefits with a given budget. The contributions of this paper include a mathematical formulation of the cloud service provider selection problem in which both the object functions and cost measurements are clearly defined, algorithms that selects among cloud storage providers to maximize the data survival probability or the amount of surviving data, subject to a fixed budget, and a series of experiments that demonstrateDuring recent years cloud service providers have successfully provided reliable and flexible resources to cloud users. For example Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) and Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) provides users storage in the cloud. Despite the tremendous efforts cloud service providers have devoted to the availability of their services, the interruption is still inevitable. Therefore just as an Internet service provider will not count on a single network provider, a cloud user should not depend on a single cloud service provider either. However, cloud service providers provide different levels of services. A more costly service is usually more reliable. As a result it is an important and challenging problem to choose among a set of service providers to fit one's need, which could be budget, failure probability, or the amount of data that can survive failure. The goal of this paper is to select cloud service providers in order to maximize the benefits with a given budget. The contributions of this paper include a mathematical formulation of the cloud service provider selection problem in which both the object functions and cost measurements are clearly defined, algorithms that selects among cloud storage providers to maximize the data survival probability or the amount of surviving data, subject to a fixed budget, and a series of experiments that demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are efficient enough to find optimal solutions in reasonable amount of time, using price and fail probability taken from real cloud providers. that the proposed algorithms are efficient enough to find optimal solutions in reasonable amount of time, using price and fail probability taken from real cloud providers.