ABSTRACT
In the cloud computing environment, comparing providers and selecting the best one among them is one of the most important issues/decisions for customer/client. The difficulty of provider selection decision increases with increasing number of cloud providers and their offerings. However, from the customers’ perspective, this enables them to take the advantage of getting its requirement from multiple cloud providers and reducing the dependency on a single cloud provider. Multi-cloud has been the focus of recent research; it is a strategy that assists customer to avoid vendor lock-in problem. This chapter presents a general model for selecting providers in multi-cloud environment considering any number of IaaS services based on two evaluation criteria: cost and performance. The problem was formulated as integer programming and it was approved to be a NP hard problem. Consequently, to solve it, three metaheuristic algorithms were used: Genetic Algorithm (GA), Harmony Search (HS), and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). In order to test and compare the performance of the proposed algorithms, a case study was generated. Results showed improved performance of PSO compared to GA and HS.
