A Cloud Computing Broker Model for IaaS Resources

Infrastructure-as-a-Service is the most flexible form of cloud computing and provides great opportunities to acquire and release computing resources as necessary. However, consumers face an increasingly opaque market due to growing number of providers and tariff options. As an approach to aid consumers finding the right tariff matching their needs, we suggest a broker model as an intermediate between consumer and providers. Based on a demand specified by the consumer our broker model implements a process to identify the most cost-efficient tariff. Using a database with performance metrics we collected by benchmarking the provider machines, the tariff selection is based on true performance data and is able to consider task specific component dependencies, e.g. for CPU intensive tasks. We demonstrate the functionality of our model with a test run.