Intra-cloud lightning: Building CDNs in the cloud

Content distribution networks (CDNs) using storage clouds have recently started to emerge. Compared to traditional CDNs, storage cloud-based CDNs have the advantage of cost effectively offering hosting services to Web content providers without owning infrastructure. However, existing work on replica placement in CDNs does not readily apply in the cloud. In this paper, we investigated the joint problem of building distribution paths and placing Web server replicas in cloud CDNs to minimize the cost incurred on the CDN providers while satisfying QoS requirements for user requests. We formulate the cost optimization problem with accurate cost models and QoS requirements and show that the monthly cost can be as low as 2.62 US Dollars for a small Web site. We develop a suite of offline, online-static and online-dynamic heuristic algorithms that take as input network topology and work load information such as user location and request rates. We then evaluate the heuristics via Web trace-based simulation, and show that our heuristics behave very close to optimal under various network conditions.