SRL: A Scalability Rule Language for Multi-Cloud Environments

The benefits of cloud computing have led to a proliferation of infrastructures and platforms covering the provisioning and deployment requirements of many cloud-based applications. However, the requirements of an application may change during its life cycle. Therefore, its provisioning and deployment should be adapted so that the application can deliver its target quality of service throughout its entire life cycle. Existing solutions typically support only simple adaptation scenarios, whereby scalability rules map conditions on fixed metrics to a single scaling action targeting a single cloud environment (e.g., scale out an application component). However, these solutions fail to support complex adaptation scenarios, whereby scalability rules could map conditions on custom metrics to multiple scaling actions targeting multi-cloud environments. In this paper, we propose the Scalability Rule Language (SRL), a language for specifying scalability rules that support such complex adaptation scenarios of multi-cloud applications. SRL provides Eclipse-based tool support, thus allowing modellers not only to specify scalability rules but also to syntactically and semantically validate them. Moreover, SRL is well integrated with the Cloud Modelling Language (CloudML), thus allowing modellers to associate their scalability rules with the components and virtual machines of provisioning and deployment models.