Cloud User-Centric Enhancements of the Simulator CloudSim to Improve Cloud Deployment Option Analysis

Cloud environments can be simulated using the toolkit CloudSim. By employing concepts such as physical servers in datacenters, virtual machine allocation policies, or coarse-grained models of deployed software, it focuses on a cloud provider perspective. In contrast, a cloud user who wants to migrate complex systems to the cloud typically strives to find a cloud deployment option that is best suited for its sophisticated system architecture, is interested in determining the best trade-off between costs and performance, or wants to compare runtime reconfiguration plans, for instance. We present significant enhancements of CloudSim that allow to follow this cloud user perspective and enable the frictionless integration of fine-grained application models that, to a great extent, can be derived automatically from software systems. Our quantitative evaluation demonstrates the applicability and accuracy of our approach by comparing its simulation results with actual deployments that utilize the cloud environment Amazon EC2.