Service deployment strategies for efficient execution of composite SaaS applications on cloud platform

• We propose a graph model for solving the service deployment problem on cloud.
• Our approach considers both communication costs and execution parallelism.
• Service deployment is transformed into a typical minimum k-cut problem for solution.

Cloud computing has caused a revolution in our way of developing and using software. Software development and deployment based on the new models of Software as a Service (SaaS) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) are expected to bring a lot of benefits for users. However, software developers and service providers have to address new challenging issues before such benefits can be realized. This paper explores one of the critical issues, service deployment, for reducing execution time of composite SaaS applications, and proposes an integrated approach to the service deployment problem which takes not only inter-service communication costs but also the potential parallelism among services into consideration. In the approach, two types of graphs are developed to model the communication costs between services, Service Dependency Graph (SDG), and potential parallelism among services, Service Concurrence Graph (SCG), respectively. Then, these two graphs are integrated into a single Service Relationship Graph (SRG) and the service deployment problem is transformed into a minimum k-cut problem for solution. A series of experiments were conducted to evaluate the proposed approach. The experimental results indicate that our approach outperforms previous deployment methods significantly in terms of service response time.