  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.
