Estimating costs of multi-component enterprise applications

Estimating the cost of a multi-component application (e.g., its resource or energy consumption) isfundamental in nowadays enterprise IT, especially if we consider that current pricing models are mainly payper-use. While this is still manageable on small applications, it is really hard to manually estimate the cost oflarge-scale enterprise applications involving hundreds of interdependent application components. In this article,we formalise the problem of estimating costs of multi-component applications, by representing the structure ofan application as a typed directed graph, and by allowing to associate different types of costs with differentapplication components. We show that costs can be fully customised, and that associating different costs withthe same application leads to different cost estimation problems defined on that application.We then present anapproach for solving cost estimation problems on multi-component applications, which is based on terminatingand confluent graph transformations. We also present a prototype implemenation of our approach, which weuse to run a case study based on a third-party application.