A Performance and Profit Oriented Data Replication Strategy for Cloud Systems

In today's world, tenants of cloud systems expect timely responses to queries that process ever-increasing sizes of data. However, most cloud providers offer their services without any performance guarantees to their tenants. In this paper we propose a data replication strategy that aims to satisfy performance guarantees for the tenant while ensuring profitability of the cloud provider. Our strategy estimates the response time of the queries, as well as the expenditures that affect the profitability of the cloud provider. The decision of whether to perform replication is determined by the fulfillment of these two criteria. Validity of the proposed strategy is provided by means of a simulation study.