Abstract

Cloud confederation is the union of cloud data centers that allows outsourcing user requests by a cloud provider dur-ing peak hours to liberate it from the constraint of limited physical resources. Federation extends some of the features of cloud like low cost, scalability, robustness and availability while increases the price and revenue of the providers along with maintaining a high QoS by effectively utilizing the re-sources of the data centers. Existing works on cloud feder-ation do not consider all three categories of instances and hence cannot maximize their profits. Moreover, the process of establishing cloud federation and taking cost efficient de-cisions based on QoS parameters has not yet been provided in recent works. In this paper, we have designed a data communication model for the members of a cloud confeder-ation, which exploits clear understanding of the usage pat-tern, types of requests in addition to infrastructure expenses. We develop an algorithm and a model for cost calculation, which enhances the decision making process over all the VM types (on-demand, reserved, spot) to increase resources uti-lization and profit. The simulation results, conducted on CloudSim, indicate that, our proposed model and algorithm enhances the profit, utilization, and QoS in a cloud confeder-ation environment compared to a number of state-of-the-art approaches.