AutoScaleSim: A simulation toolkit for auto-scaling Web applications in clouds

Auto-scaling of Web applications is an extensively investigated issue in cloud computing. To evaluate auto-scaling mechanisms, the cloud community is facing considerable challenges on either real cloud platforms or custom test-beds. Challenges include – but not limited to – deployment impediments, the complexity of setting parameters, and most importantly, the cost of hosting and testing Web applications on a massive scale. Hence, simulation is presently one of the most popular evaluation solutions to overcome these obstacles. Existing simulators, however, fail to provide support for hosting, deploying and subsequently auto-scaling of Web applications. In this paper, we introduce AutoScaleSim, which extends the existing CloudSim simulator, to support auto-scaling of Web applications in cloud environments in a customizable, extendable and scalable manner. Using AutoScaleSim, the cloud community can freely implement/evaluate policies for all four phases of auto-scaling mechanisms, that is, Monitoring, Analysis, Planning and Execution. AutoScaleSim can also be used for evaluating load balancing algorithms similarly. We conducted a set of experiments to validate and carefully evaluate the performance of AutoScaleSim in a real cloud platform, with a wide range of performance metrics.