A Review of Cloud Computing Simulation Platforms and Related Environments

Recent years have seen an increasing trend towards the development of Discrete Event Simulation (DES) platforms to support cloud computing related decision making and research. The complexity of cloud environments is increasing with scale and heterogeneity posing a challenge for the efficient management of cloud applications and data centre resources. The increasing ubiquity of social media, mobile and cloud computing combined with the Internet of Things and emerging paradigms such as Edge and Fog Computing is exacerbating this complexity. Given the scale, complexity and commercial sensitivity of hyperscale computing environments, the opportunity for experimentation is limited and requires substantial investment of resources both in terms of time and effort. DES provides a low risk technique for providing decision support for complex hyperscale computing scenarios. In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the development and extension of tools to support DES for cloud computing resulting in a wide range of tools which vary in terms of their utility and features. Through a review and analysis of available literature, this paper provides an overview and multi-level feature analysis of 33 DES tools for cloud computing environments. This review updates and extends existing reviews to include not only autonomous simulation platforms, but also on plugins and extensions for specific cloud computing use cases. This review identifies the emergence of CloudSim as a de facto base platform for simulation research and shows a lack of tool support for distributed execution (parallel execution on distributed memory systems).