PICS: A Public IaaS Cloud Simulator

Public clouds become essential for many organizations to run their applications because they provide huge financial benefits and great flexibility. However, it is very challenging to accurately evaluate the performance and cost of applications without actual deployment on the clouds. Existing cloud simulators are generally designed from the perspective of cloud service providers, thus they can be under-developed for answering questions for the perspective of cloud users. To solve this prediction and evaluation problem, we created a Public Cloud IaaS Simulator (PICS). PICS enables the cloud user to evaluate the cost and performance of public IaaS clouds along with such dimensions like VM and storage service, resource scaling, job scheduling, and diverse workload patterns. We extensively validated PICS by comparing its results with the data acquired from real public IaaS cloud using real cloud-applications. We show that PICS provides highly accurate simulation results (less than 5% of average errors) under a variety of use cases. Moreover, we evaluated PICS' sensitivity with imprecise simulation parameters. The results show that PICS still provides very reliable simulation results with imprecise simulation parameters and performance uncertainty.