Modeling User Growth for Cloud Scalability and Availability

Abstract

From users' point of view, cloud computing delivers elastic computing services to users based on their needs. Cloud computing service providers must make sure enough resources are provided to meet users' demand, by either the provision of more than enough resource, or the provision of just-enough resource. This paper investigates the growth of the user set of a cloud computing service from statistic's point of view. The investigation leads to a simple model on the growth of the system in terms of users. This model provides a simple way to compute the scale of a system at a given time, thus allowing a cloud computing service provider to predict the system's scale based on the number of users and plan for the infrastructure deployment.