UM 2 Q: Multi-cloud Selection Model based on Multi-criteria to Deploy a Distributed Microservice-based Application Juliana Carvalho 1 , Dario Vieira 2 and Fernando Trinta 3 1 Federal University of Piau´ ı (UFPI), Picos, Brazil 2 EFREI-Paris, Paris, France 3 Federal University of Cear´ a (UFC), Fortaleza, Brazil Keywords: Multi-cloud Selection, Microservices, Multi-criteria Decision-making Method. Abstract: Choosing the best configuration to deploy a distributed application in a multi-cloud environment is a complex task since many cloud providers offer several services with different capabilities. In this paper, we present a multi-cloud selection process to deploy a distributed microservice-based application, which has low commu- nication cost among microservices. The proposed selection process is part of PacificClouds, an approach that intends to manage the deployment and execution of distributed applications across multiple providers from the software architect perspective. The proposed approach selects various providers, where each provider must host an entire microservice with multiple tasks consuming several cloud services. The UM 2 Q approach se- lects the provider that better meets the software architect requirements, for each microservice of a multi-cloud application. Hence, the proposed process of selecting multiple providers uses multi-criteria decision-making methods to rank the cloud services and selects cloud providers and services by individually observing each microservice requirement, such as cloud availability, response time, and cost. Further, we propose a formal description of UM 2 Q and a brief one of the strategy implementation. We also introduce a set of experiments to evaluate UM 2 Q performance, and the outcomes showed its feasibility for a variable number of requirements, microservices and providers, even for extreme values. 1 INTRODUCTION Nowadays, Cloud Computing has become a very pop- ular model to provide IT resources. Many cloud com- panies are widely available to offer several resources such as virtual servers, storage, and entire applica- tions to their users. Cloud Computing market is very competitive, and users have a variety of offerings to select the service that best fits their requirements. In contrast, cloud providers try to provide several kinds of services and resources, leading to a situation where they became specific features. This scenario brings a severe challenge for cloud applications known as ven- dor lock-in. A new and more challenging scenario for cloud application developers is called multi-cloud, where a single application is composed of resources or ser- vices hosted by different cloud providers. Multi-cloud enables developers to build their systems with com- ponents that better fit their needs, but, it also brings new challenges. For instance, an application may re- quire resources available on different cloud providers, where each resource has different costs, performance, or availability offers. Hence, multi-cloud brings more flexibility to software architects where they can select services for providers that better serve their system design. However, since these applications are more complex, using multiple clouds brings challenges for choosing the best set of resources among the avail- able ones as there may be several providers offering many services with the same functionalities, but dif- ferent capabilities. This scenario makes the process of selecting the best providers a hard task. As aforementioned, to facilitate the software ar- chitects decision-making, Carvalho et al., 2018b pro- posed PacificClouds, which is a new approach to manage the deployment and execution process of an application based on microservices in multi-cloud en- vironment from the software architect perspective. The multi-cloud environment aims to mitigate vendor lock-in and also allows the software architect to dis- tribute an application to take the advantages offered by cloud computing. Also, PacificClouds uses mi- croservices as the architectural style because they pro- 56 Carvalho, J., Vieira, D. and Trinta, F. UM2Q: Multi-cloud Selection Model based on Multi-criteria to Deploy a Distributed Microservice-based Application. DOI: 10.5220/0009338200560068 In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER 2020), pages 56-68 ISBN: 978-989-758-424-4 Copyright c  2020 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved