A consensus-based approach for selecting cloud plans

An important problem when moving an application to the cloud consists in selecting the most suitable cloud plan (among those available from cloud providers) for the application deployment, with the goal of finding the best match between application requirements and plan characteristics. If a user wishes to move multiple applications at the same time, this task can be complicated by the fact that different applications might have different (and possibly contrasting) requirements. In this paper, we propose an approach enabling users to select a cloud plan that best balances the satisfaction of the requirements of multiple applications. Our solution operates by first ranking the available plans for each application (matching plan characteristics and application requirements) and then by selecting, through a consensus-based process, the one that is considered more acceptable by all applications.