Model-Driven Application Refactoring to Minimize Deployment Costs in Preemptible Cloud Resources

Performance assessment of cloud-based applications requires new methodologies to deal with the complexity of software systems and the variability of cloud resources. In this paper, we address the problem of reducing the total costs for running cloud-based applications while fulfilling servicelevel objectives (SLOs). To this end, we define an approach to refactor a cloud application in such a way that, when it is deployed, it requires less computational capacity and therefore less resources. We experimented our approach on top of a modified optimal provisioning heuristic designed for preemptible cloud resources and the results show that it reduces deployment costs, up to 60% when compared to the same approach, but without model-driven application refactoring. Keywords-software performance engineering; cloud computing; application refactoring; resource provisioning