Regulations and latency-aware load distribution of web applications in Multi-Clouds

Abstract

Cloud data centres have become the preferred hosting environment for large-scale web-facing applications. They allow unprecedented scalability in response to a dynamic and unpredictable workload. However, many applications need to scale beyond the boundaries of a single data centre to multiple geographically dispersed clouds sites (i.e. a Multi-Cloud) to provide regulatory compliance, better Quality of Experience (QoE) and increased fault tolerance. In this work, we introduce a flexible framework which allows interactive web applications to utilise a Multi-Cloud environment. It redirects users to suitable cloud sites considering the latency and regulatory constraints. Regulatory requirements are specified via a flexible and simple domain-specific model, which is then interpreted by a rule inference engine. We conducted an experimental evaluation of the proposed system using services of ten cloud sites/data centres located in five continents and offered by two cloud providers, namely Amazon and NeCTAR. The results show that our approach minimises latency, is fault tolerant, and meets all stated regulatory requirements with negligible performance overhead.