Estimating costs of multi-component enterprise applications

Abstract

Abstract Estimating the cost of a multi-component application (e.g., its resource or energy consumption) is fundamental in nowadays enterprise IT, especially if we consider that current pricing models are mainly pay per-use. While this is still manageable on small applications, it is really hard to manually estimate the cost of large-scale enterprise applications involving hundreds of interdependent application components. In this article, we formalise the problem of estimating costs of multi-component applications, by representing the structure of an application as a typed directed graph, and by allowing to associate different types of costs with different application components. We show that costs can be fully customised, and that associating different costs with the same application leads to different cost estimation problems defined on that application.We then present an approach for solving cost estimation problems on multi-component applications, which is based on terminating and confluent graph transformations. We also present a prototype implemenation of our approach, which we use to run a case study based on a third-party application.