Quantifying Manageability of Cloud Platforms

Cloud computing has changed the way companies are managing their IT infrastructure and application development and/or deployment. While there are a number of Cloud platforms available, it is a challenge to identify a cloud platform that best suits the business needs. As a consequence Cloud service providers may end up selecting a platform that is either too low- or too high-level to manage, or does not offer the paradigms needed. In this paper, we introduce the Cloud manageability metrics and an approach to quantify the manageability of cloud platforms using the introduced metrics. We then use the metrics and approach to compare manageability of different cloud IaaS and PaaS platforms for specific use case scenarios. The values for the metrics are derived by executing the use cases in each platform using test environments. Based on the results of the comparison, we recommend a cloud platform that is best suited for different organizations needs with respect to cloud management. We expect that the proposed approach will help organizations to evaluate various cloud platforms and choose the platform that best matches their needs.