Building an Expert System for Evaluation of Commercial Cloud Services

TL;DR

This paper presents an expert system designed to assist in evaluating commercial Cloud services, addressing unique challenges and enabling more efficient, reusable, and sustainable evaluation processes for users.

Contribution

It introduces a novel expert system that leverages accumulated knowledge to facilitate Cloud service evaluation, overcoming challenges of rapid change and user variability.

Findings

Expert system provides evaluation suggestions and guidelines.

Conceptual validation shows system's effectiveness.

Enhances reusability and sustainability of evaluation efforts.

Abstract

Commercial Cloud services have been increasingly supplied to customers in industry. To facilitate customers' decision makings like cost-benefit analysis or Cloud provider selection, evaluation of those Cloud services are becoming more and more crucial. However, compared with evaluation of traditional computing systems, more challenges will inevitably appear when evaluating rapidly-changing and user-uncontrollable commercial Cloud services. This paper proposes an expert system for Cloud evaluation that addresses emerging evaluation challenges in the context of Cloud Computing. Based on the knowledge and data accumulated by exploring the existing evaluation work, this expert system has been conceptually validated to be able to give suggestions and guidelines for implementing new evaluation experiments. As such, users can conveniently obtain evaluation experiences by using this expert system, which is essentially able to make existing efforts in Cloud services evaluation reusable and sustainable.