Decision-making framework for user-based inter-cloud service migration

• Presents an overview of the user-side cloud service management (UCSM) framework.
• Presents intelligent decision making on the basis of QoS and user’s preferences.
• Presents algorithms to find the cost and time to migrate to other cloud services.
• Utilizes multi-criteria decision making to find the best service to migrate to.

Cloud computing has rapidly become the most effective computing paradigm for today’s increasingly technology-dependent society. The emerging concepts of federated clouds with support for interoperability between different cloud providers and open standards in cloud middleware have opened up new challenges in cloud service management. One of the emerging research areas in cloud computing is the possibility of live virtual machine migration between different clouds. This is of importance when the quality of a cloud service currently used by a user degrades or a new cloud service is developed which is better in terms of quality, performance and cost than the current service being used. In such scenarios, the user needs to make a decision as to whether to continue with the currently used service or migrate to the newly available service. In our previous work, we presented a decision-making approach that assists a cloud service user in selecting a cloud service provider based on the QoS of its services. In this paper, we extend our previous work in the pre-interaction time phase and discuss the decision-making process involved in the migration from one cloud service to another cloud service through inter-cloud virtual machine migration.