Design support for performance- and cost-efficient (re)distribution of cloud applications

In the last decade the IT landscape has experienced a revolutionary change in both the research and industry domains due to the strong emergence and adoption of cloud providers and services. The increase of available cloud services together with the materialization of DevOps methodologies have forced a change in how software is engineered and operated. Nowadays, organizations can leverage a wide spectrum of cloud services to build, migrate, distribute, and even replace their application components in the cloud. In summary, the transformation of capital into operational expenditures when using private or public clouds has become a reality. The emergence of cloud services, however, brought with it a substantial complexity when designing and running cloud applications. More specifically, cloud environments are intrinsically multi-tenant, where different tenants (or cloud consumers) consume computational, network, and storage resources on an on-demand basis. This type of virtualized environment causes performance to be variable and