Multi-provider cloud computing network infrastructure optimization

Cloud-adopting enterprises have been increasingly employing multiple cloud providers concurrently, for example, to consume unique services and to mitigate data lock-in risk. As a consequence, the enterprises must be able to address contrasting quality-of-service degrees offered by the different providers. This paper presents an intelligent cloud cache eviction approach, namely i-Cloud, as the core component of a client-side cloud cache. i-Cloud is capable of reducing public cloud data-out expenses, improving cloud network scalability and lowering cloud service access latencies specifically in multi-provider cloud environments. Trace-driven simulations have shown that i-Cloud outperformed well-known approaches in all performance metrics. In addition, i-Cloud is not only able to achieve optimal performances in all metrics simultaneously but also delivered relatively stable performances across all performance metrics. The results have also indicated that taking the nonuniformity of data-out charge rates into cache eviction decisions improved caching performances in all metrics. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.