8. Conclusions
The crucial role of networking in Cloud computing requires a holistic vision of both networking and computing resources in a software-defined Cloud environment, which leads to composition of network and compute service provisioning. The research presented in this paper studies the problem of modeling and performance analysis for composite network– compute service provisioning systems. The main contributions made in this paper include a new approach to modeling service capabilities of composite network–compute service systems and analysis techniques for evaluating delay performance of composite network–compute services. Application of the recent development in network calculus with data scaling makes the modeling and analysis techniques developed in this paper general and agnostic to network and Cloud implementations; thus are applicable to various heterogeneous networking and computing systems coexisting in a Cloud environment for composite network–compute service provisioning. Both analytical and numerical results obtained in this paper indicate that capacities of network and compute services as well as the data transform factors between these two types of services have direct impact on delay performance of composite services. The developed model and analysis techniques provide Cloud service customers, service brokers, and service providers with an effective tool for evaluating achievable service performance in software-defined Cloud environments.