An Evaluation Engine for Dynamic Ranking of Cloud Providers

The paper focuses on creation of an effective dynamic ranking service for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS cloud providers. It considers building a quality model for this purpose along with definition of quality measurement procedures. The paper discusses several techniques known from already existing price comparison engines that could be modified and adopted for comparison of cloud providers. A technique for filtering measured data is proposed, in particular to avoid vendor lock-in issues. The paper presents a design and results from an engine for simulation of various ranking algorithms in response to streams of prices from various providers. Examples with various streams of provider prices and resulting rankings are presented that cope with the vendor lock-in issue as well as consider the impact of long or short-term price changes on the ranking.