Modeling and Simulation of Scalable Cloud Computing Environments and the CloudSim Toolkit: Challenges and Opportunities

TL;DR

This paper introduces CloudSim, a flexible simulation toolkit for modeling and analyzing scalable cloud computing environments, addressing challenges in resource allocation, energy efficiency, and system management.

Contribution

The paper presents CloudSim, a novel extensible toolkit that simplifies the simulation of complex cloud environments, supporting multiple data centers, VM management, and federation policies.

Findings

CloudSim enables detailed performance evaluation of cloud resource management policies.

Supports simulation of multiple data centers and VM migration strategies.

Facilitates research on energy efficiency and scalability in cloud computing.

Abstract

Cloud computing aims to power the next generation data centers and enables application service providers to lease data center capabilities for deploying applications depending on user QoS (Quality of Service) requirements. Cloud applications have different composition, configuration, and deployment requirements. Quantifying the performance of resource allocation policies and application scheduling algorithms at finer details in Cloud computing environments for different application and service models under varying load, energy performance (power consumption, heat dissipation), and system size is a challenging problem to tackle. To simplify this process, in this paper we propose CloudSim: an extensible simulation toolkit that enables modelling and simulation of Cloud computing environments. The CloudSim toolkit supports modelling and creation of one or more virtual machines (VMs) on a simulated node of a Data Center, jobs, and their mapping to suitable VMs. It also allows simulation of multiple Data Centers to enable a study on federation and associated policies for migration of VMs for reliability and automatic scaling of applications.