Performance assessment of cloud-based applications
requires new methodologies to deal with the complexity
of software systems and the variability of cloud resources. In
this paper, we address the problem of reducing the total costs
for running cloud-based applications while fulfilling servicelevel
objectives (SLOs). To this end, we define an approach
to refactor a cloud application in such a way that, when
it is deployed, it requires less computational capacity and
therefore less resources. We experimented our approach on
top of a modified optimal provisioning heuristic designed for
preemptible cloud resources and the results show that it reduces
deployment costs, up to 60% when compared to the same
approach, but without model-driven application refactoring.