A fine-grained performance model of cloud computing centers

Cloud computing is a general term for system architectures that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet, made possible by significant innovations in virtualization and distributed computing, as well as improved access to high-speed Internet. A cloud service differs from traditional hosting in three principal aspects. First, it is provided on demand, typically by the minute or the hour; second, it is elastic since the user can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any given time; and third, the service is fully managed by the provider – user needs little more than computer and Internet access. Typically a contract is negotiated and agreed between a customer and a service provider; the service provider is required to execute service requests from a customer within negotiated quality of service (QoS) requirements for a given price. Due to dynamic nature of cloud environments, diversity of user’s requests, resource virtualization, and time dependency of load, providing expected quality of service while avoiding over-provisioning is not a simple task. To this end, cloud provider must have efficient and accurate techniques for performance evaluation of cloud computing centers