Dynamic Selecting Approach for Multi-cloud Providers

Since multi-cloud can be used both to mitigate vendor lock-in and take advantages of cloud computing, an application can be deployed to multiple cloud providers that best meet the user and application needs. For this, it is necessary to select the cloud providers that will host an application. The selection process is a complex task due to the fact that each application part has its constraints, but mainly due to the existence of many cloud providers’, each of them with its specific characteristics. In this article, we propose a cloud providers selection process to host applications based on microservices, in which each microservice must be hosted by the provider that best meet the user and microservice requirements. We use applications based on microservices because they can be independently deployed and scalable. In addition, we use Simple Additive Weighting method for ranking the candidate cloud providers then we select candidate providers amongst them to host each microservice by mapping the selection process to multi-choice knapsack problem. Besides that, the microservices are analyzed individually, except for the cost constraint. The selection process examines the cost constraint by observing all application microservices. Our approach still differs from others described in the literature because it selects multiple cloud providers to host the application microservices, which one for each application microservice. In this article, we also evaluated the proposed method through experiments and the result shows the viability of our approach. Finally, we point out future directions for the cloud providers selection process.