Cloud computing environment simulators enable cost-effective experimentation of novel infrastructure designs and management approaches by avoiding significant costs incurred from repetitive deployments in real Cloud platforms. However, widely used Cloud environment simulators compromise on usability due to complexities in design and configuration, along with the added overhead of programming language expertise. Existing approaches attempting to reduce this overhead, such as script-based simulators and Graphical User Interface (GUI) based simulators, often compromise on the extensibility of the simulator. Simulator extensibility allows for customization at a fine-grained level, thus reducing it significantly affects flexibility in creating simulations. To address these challenges, we propose an architectural framework to enable human-readable script-based simulations in existing Cloud environment simulators while minimizing the impact on simulator extensibility. We implement the proposed framework for the widely used Cloud environment simulator, the CloudSim toolkit, and compare it against state-of-the-art baselines using a practical use case. The resulting framework, called CloudSim Express, achieves extensible simulations while surpassing baselines with over a 71.43% reduction in code complexity and an 89.42% reduction in lines of code.

翻译：云计算环境模拟器通过避免在实际云平台中重复部署所带来的高昂成本，能够支持对新型基础设施设计及管理方法进行经济高效的实验验证。然而，广泛使用的云环境模拟器因设计与配置复杂，加之对编程语言专业知识的要求，在可用性方面存在不足。现有降低这一负担的方法（如基于脚本的模拟器和基于图形用户界面的模拟器）往往牺牲了模拟器的可扩展性。模拟器的可扩展性允许细粒度定制，严重削弱该特性会显著影响创建仿真的灵活性。为应对这些挑战，我们提出了一种架构框架，旨在现有云环境模拟器中实现人类可读的脚本化仿真，同时将对模拟器可扩展性的影响降至最低。我们针对广泛使用的云环境模拟器CloudSim工具包实现了该框架，并通过实际用例与现有最优基线方法进行了对比。由此产生的框架名为CloudSim Express，在实现可扩展仿真的同时，代码复杂度降低幅度超过71.43%，代码行数减少幅度达89.42%，全面超越基线方法。