Enterprise applications cloud rightsizing through a joint benchmarking and optimization approach

•A methodology and tools that support the design and migration of applications to Cloud.•The performance advertised by cloud providers is to be used carefully.•The proposed benchmark procedure for migrated Cloud applications leads to reduced costs.

Migrating an application to the cloud environment requires non-functional properties consideration such as cost, performance and Quality of Service (QoS). Given the variety and the plethora of cloud offerings in addition with the consumption-based pricing models currently available in the cloud market, it is extremely complex to find the optimal deployment that fits the application requirements and provides the best QoS and cost trade-offs. In many cases the performance of these service offerings may vary depending on the congestion level, provider policies and how the application types that are intended to be executed upon them use the computing resources. A key challenge for customers before moving to Cloud is to know application behavior on cloud platforms in order to select the best-suited environment to host their application components in terms of performance and cost. In this paper, we propose a combined methodology and a set of tools that support the design and migration of enterprise applications to Cloud. Our tool chain includes: (i) the performance assessment of cloud services based on cloud benchmark results, (ii) a profiler/classifier mechanism that identifies the computing footprint of an arbitrary application and provides the best matching with a cloud service solution in terms of performance and cost, (iii) and a design space exploration tool, which is effective in identifying the deployment of minimum costs taking into account workload changes and providing QoS guarantees.