J2CBROKER: A service broker simulation tool for cooperative clouds

The Internet and digital technologies are transforming our world, but existing barriers, mainly due to obsolete Information Technologies (IT), lead citizens to miss out on goods and services, enterprises and start-ups to limit their horizons, and businesses and governments to cannot fully benefit from digital tools. Recently, Cloud computing emerged as hot topic in IT, both in industrial and academic area, in order to overcome the above barriers. Its use in large scale distributed infrastructure, platform or software services is motivated by the possibility to promote a new economy of scale in different contexts. Such scenario demands timely, repeatable, and controllable methodologies for evaluation of algorithms, applications and policies before the development of Cloud services or products, especially to achieve a good compromise between several performance indicators. To this end, simulations-based environments allow to evaluate the hypothesis prior to the software development, thus reducing the risk of economic losses, scarce Quality of Service or Quality of Experience. In this paper we present and discuss a simulation-based approach for Cloud Brokerage ecosystems. More specifically, we propose the J2CBROKER Simulation Tool, mainly based on JAVA and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) technologies. Its architecture, functionalities and technological choices are discussed and motivated. Moreover, we present a case of study to evaluate the goodness of the proposed approach.