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From DevOps to BizOps: Economic Sustainability for Scalable Cloud Applications

Published:14 November 2017Publication History
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Abstract

Virtualization of resources in cloud computing has enabled developers to commission and recommission resources at will and on demand. This virtualization is a coin with two sides. On one hand, the flexibility in managing virtual resources has enabled developers to efficiently manage their costs; they can easily remove unnecessary resources or add resources temporarily when the demand increases. On the other hand, the volatility of such environment and the velocity with which changes can occur may have a greater impact on the economic position of a stakeholder and the business balance of the overall ecosystem. In this work, we recognise the business ecosystem of cloud computing as an economy of scale and explore the effect of this fact on decisions concerning scaling the infrastructure of web applications to account for fluctuations in demand. The goal is to reveal and formalize opportunities for economically optimal scaling that takes into account not only the cost of infrastructure but also the revenue from service delivery and eventually the profit of the service provider. The end product is a scaling mechanism that makes decisions based on both performance and economic criteria and takes adaptive actions to optimize both performance and profitability for the system.

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            • Published in

              cover image ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems
              ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems  Volume 12, Issue 4
              December 2017
              224 pages
              ISSN:1556-4665
              EISSN:1556-4703
              DOI:10.1145/3155314
              Issue’s Table of Contents

              Copyright © 2017 ACM

              Publisher

              Association for Computing Machinery

              New York, NY, United States

              Publication History

              • Published: 14 November 2017
              • Revised: 1 September 2017
              • Accepted: 1 September 2017
              • Received: 1 November 2016
              Published in taas Volume 12, Issue 4

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