Impressionism in Cloud Computing - A Position Paper on Capacity Planning in Cloud Computing Environments

Abstract

Cloud computing is a model that relies on virtualization and can lower costs to the user by charging only for the computational resources used by the application. There is a way to use the advantages of cloud computing in data-intensive applications like MapReduce and it is by using a virtual machine (VM) cluster in the cloud. An interesting challenge with VM clusters is determining the size of the VMs that will compose the cluster, because with an appropriate cluster and VM size, users will be able to take a full advantage of resources, i.e., reducing costs by using idle resources and gaining performance. This position paper is intended to bring to consideration the necessity for accurate capacity planning at user level, in order to take fully advantage of cloud resources and will focus specially for data-intensive applications users.