Cloud plan selection under requirements of multiple applications

Selecting the right plan is a key issue when moving to the cloud. When multiple applications need to be outsourced at the same time, the problem becomes more complicated, and different challenges might need to be solved. In this paper, we address this problem, characterize different outsourcing scenarios, and propose a brokerage-based approach that, depending on the specific scenario, is able to compute one (or more) ranking(s) over a set of candidate plans, based on how they satisfy the specific application requirements. Our approach is able to combine application requirements to determine a plan that is suitable for all applications, possibly taking their importance into consideration (differentiating the impact that their requirements should have in the selection process), and allows different stakeholders to express such importance through linguistic variables, hence simplifying their definition and capturing the imprecision of human judgment.