Modelling and Simulation Environment for Self-Adaptive and Self-Aware Cloud Architectures

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel modelling and simulation environment tailored for self-adaptive and self-aware cloud architectures, addressing the lack of such tools and aiding researchers in design, testing, and runtime decision-making.

Contribution

It presents a new simulation toolkit specifically designed for self-adaptive and self-aware cloud systems, facilitating development and evaluation.

Findings

Validated with benchmarks and use cases

Supports design and testing of adaptation mechanisms

Enhances runtime decision-making in cloud architectures

Abstract

Cloud-based software systems are increasingly becoming complex and operating in highly dynamic environments. Self-adaptivity and self-awareness have recently emerged to cope with such level of dynamicity and scalability. Meanwhile, designing and testing such systems have poven to be a challenging task, as well as research benchmarking. Despite the influx of research in both self-adaptivity and cloud computing, as well as the various simulations environments proposed so far, there is a general lack of modelling and simulation environments of self-adaptive and self-aware cloud architectures. To aid researchers and practioners in overcoming such challenges, this paper presents a novel modelling and simulation environment for self-adaptive and self-aware cloud architectures. The environment provides significant benefits for designing self-adaptive and self-aware cloud architectures, as well as testing adaptation and awareness mechanisms. The toolkit is also beneficial as a symbiotic simulator during runtime to support adaptation decisions. We experimentally validated and evaluated the implementation using benchmarks and evaluation use cases.