Analysis of Complexity and Performance for Automated Deployment of a Software Environment into the Cloud

Abstract

Moving to the cloud is a topic that tends to be present in all enterprises that have digitalized their activities. This includes the need to work with software environments specific to various business domains, accessed as services supported by various cloud providers. Besides provisioning, other important issues to be considered for cloud services are complexity and performance. This paper evaluates the processes to be followed for the deployment of such a software environment in the cloud and compares the manual and automated methods in terms of complexity. We consider several metrics that address multiple concerns: the multitude of independent paths, the capability to distinguish small changes in the process structure, plus the complexity of the human tasks, for which specific metrics are proposed. We thus show that the manual deployment process is from two to seven times more complex than the automatic one, depending on the metrics applied. This proves the importance of automation for making such a service more accessible to enterprises, regardless of their level of technical know-how in cloud computing. In addition, the performance is tested for an example of an environment and the possibilities to extend to multicloud are discussed.

Keywords

• cloud computing
• deployment automation
• process models
• complexity metrics