Signature-based Selection of IaaS Cloud Services

We propose a novel approach to select IaaS cloud services for a long-term period where the service providers offer limited QoS information. The proposed approach leverages free short-term trials to obtain the previously undisclosed QoS information. A new significance-based trial scheme is proposed using frequency distribution analysis to test a consumer's long-term workloads in a short trial. We introduce a novel IaaS signature technique to uniquely identify the variability of a provider's QoS performance. A Signature-based QoS Performance Discovery (SPD) algorithm is proposed which leverages the combination of free trials and IaaS signatures. A set of exhaustive experiments with real-world datasets is conducted to evaluate the proposed approach.