Cost-Effective Service Provisioning for Hybrid Cloud Applications

The workloads of social computing are tremendous, bursty and unpredictable. A hybrid cloud, which combines a private cloud and a public cloud, is a promising solution to processing the workloads. For most corporations, they leverage one public cloud. However, with fierce competition among public cloud providers, public cloud services change frequently, which may lead to service unavailability and a less cost-effective hybrid cloud solution. As a result, leveraging multiple public clouds in the hybrid cloud is a potential solution. In this paper, we identify such a problem in current hybrid cloud and analyze the necessity of load balancing for hybrid cloud applications. Focusing on cost minimization and performance guarantee, we propose a Least Cost per Connection (LCC) algorithm so as to choose the most cost-effective clouds along with adapting changes among multiple public clouds. The simulation results show that our solution can significantly decrease the outsourcing cost as well as guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) of applications.