A performance measurement model for cloud computing applications

Cloud Computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources. One of the main objectives of this technology is processing and storing very large amounts of data by means of Cloud Computing Applications. Sometimes, anomalies and defects found in the Cloud platforms affect the performance of these applications resulting in degradation of the Cloud performance. These anomalies can be identified by performance concepts of Cloud Computing based on software engineering quality models. One of the challenges in Cloud Computing is how to analyze the performance of Cloud Computing Applications in order to determine the main factors which affect the quality of the Cloud. Performance measurement results are very important because they help to detect the source of the degradation of the Cloud and, as a consequence, improve its performance. Furthermore, such results can be used in future resource planning stages or for the design of Service Level Agreements. This thesis presents Cloud Computing Application concepts that are directly related to the measurement of performance from a quantitative viewpoint. One of the challenges in defining such concepts is how to determine what type of relationships exist between the various performance base measures that define the performance concepts in a Cloud environment. For example, what is the extent of the relationship between CPU processing time and performance concepts such as time behavior? In addition, this thesis proposes a performance measurement model for Cloud Computing Applications, which integrates software quality concepts from ISO 25010 and makes use of the Taguchi´s method for the design of experiments in order to present an example of how to apply the model to a practical case