Cost-Driven Cloud Service Recommendation for Building E-Commerce Websites

With the evolution of software engineering technology, using cloud services to replace self-built information systems has been proven an economical and reliable way. However, how to help e-commerce service system builders to choose suitable compositions of cloud services that meet their needs is still a challenge. In the past decade, a number of academic studies have explored the selection strategies and algorithms for cloud services, however, most efforts are not able to consider multiple types of cloud services simultaneously to provide composite cloud service solutions. To address the above issue, this study proposes a cost-driven recommendation method, called ECSSR (E-Commerce Service Suite Recommendation). ECSSR takes the user budget as the core factor and simultaneously considers the user’s preferences for the service types. A prototype system, referred to as ECClouder, is also designed and implemented to realize the features of ECSSR. ECClouder is able to collect the user’s requirements, convert application-level requirements into infrastructure-level requirements, and produce appropriate cloud service solutions. The case study show that ECClouder can effectively help users to find cloud service solutions that are reasonably priced and meet their needs.