Simplified cloud instance selection

Abstract

Cloud computing delivers computational services to anyone over the internet. The cloud providers offer these services through a simplified billing model where customers can rent services based on the types of computing power they require. However, given the vast choice, it is complicated for a user to select the optimal instance types for a given workload or application. In this paper, we propose a user-friendly cloud instance recommendation system, which given a set of weighted coefficients representing the relevance of CPU, memory, storage and network along with a price, will recommend the best performing instances. The system only requires provider specified data about instance types and doesn’t require costly cloud benchmarking. We evaluate our approach on Microsoft Azure across a number of different common workload types.