J2CBROKER as a Service: A Service Broker Simulation Tool Integrated in OpenStack Environment

Some of the recently defined or emerging Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) promise to dramatically improve people’s lives and greatly benefit enterprises productivity. Among them, Cloud computing proves to be so disruptive to provide anyone with on-demand remote access to a large pool of third-party computing resources and services. Nonetheless, before the actual development of Cloud services, there is the need for timely, repeatable, and controllable methodologies that evaluate the conceived algorithms and policies. Simulation-based environments play a fundamental role in this direction as they considerably reduce the risk of economic losses, scarce Quality of Service and Quality of Experience. In a previous work, we presented J2CBROKER, a tool that simulates a Cloud Brokerage ecosystem, i.e., an environment where a software broker acts as an intermediary between service customers and providers in order to allow the formers to discover and select the services that best suit their needs. Herein, we discuss the evolution of such a tool that consists in its integration in the OpenStack environment in order to provide it according to the Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS) model. To this purpose, we detail the new J2CBROKER architecture. Moreover, in order to evaluate our proposal, we present a case study in which J2CBROKER is implemented as a Service in a real scenario.