An Effiecient Approach for Resource Auto-Scaling in Cloud Environments

Cloud services have become more popular among users these days. Automatic resource provisioning for cloud services is one of the important challenges in cloud environments. In the cloud computing environment, resource providers shall offer required resources to users automatically without any limitations. It means whenever a user needs more resources, the required resources should be dedicated to the users without any problems. On the other hand, if resources are more than user’s needs extra resources should be turn off temporarily and turn back on whenever they needed. In this paper, we propose an automatic resource provisioning approach based on reinforcement learning for auto-scaling resources according to Markov Decision Process (MDP). Simulation Results show that the rate of Service Level Agreement (SLA) violation and stability that the proposed approach better performance compared to the similar approaches

Cost-Effective Scheduling and Load Balancing Algorithms in Cloud Computing Using Learning Automata

Cloud computing is a distributed computing model in which access is based on demand. A cloud computing environment includes a wide variety of resource suppliers and consumers. Hence, efficient and effective methods for task scheduling and load balancing are required. This paper presents a new approach to task scheduling and load balancing in the cloud computing environment with an emphasis on the cost-efficiency of task execution through resources. The proposed algorithms are based on the fair distribution of jobs between machines, which will prevent the unconventional increase in the price of a machine and the unemployment of other machines. The two parameters Total Cost and Final Cost are designed to achieve the mentioned goal. Applying these two parameters will create a fair basis for job scheduling and load balancing. To implement the proposed approach, learning automata are used as an effective and efficient technique in reinforcement learning. Finally, to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms we conducted simulations using CloudSim toolkit and compared proposed algorithms with other existing algorithms like BCO, PES, CJS, PPO and MCT. The proposed algorithms can balance the Final Cost and Total Cost of machines. Also, the proposed algorithms outperform best existing algorithms in terms of efficiency and imbalance degree

A Competition-based Pricing Strategy in Cloud Markets using Regret Minimization Techniques

Cloud computing as a fairly new commercial paradigm, widely investigated by different researchers, already has a great range of challenges. Pricing is a major problem in Cloud computing marketplace; as providers are competing to attract more customers without knowing the pricing policies of each other. To overcome this lack of knowledge, we model their competition by an incomplete-information game. Considering the issue, this work proposes a pricing policy related to the regret minimization algorithm and applies it to the considered incomplete-information game. Based on the competition based marketplace of the Cloud, providers update the distribution of their strategies using the experienced regret. The idea of iteratively applying the algorithm for updating probabilities of strategies causes the regret get minimized faster. The experimental results show much more increase in profits of the providers in comparison with other pricing policies. Besides, the efficiency of a variety of regret minimization techniques in a simulated marketplace of Cloud are discussed which have not been observed in the studied literature. Moreover, return on investment of providers in considered organizations is studied and promising results appeared

Energy and Performance: Management of Virtual Machines: Provisioning, Placement, and Consolidation

Cloud computing is a new computing paradigm that offers scalable storage and compute resources to users on demand through Internet. Public cloud providers operate large-scale data centers around the world to handle a large number of users request. However, data centers consume an immense amount of electrical energy that can lead to high operating costs and carbon emissions. One of the most common and effective method in order to reduce energy consumption is Dynamic Virtual Machines Consolidation (DVMC) enabled by the virtualization technology. DVMC dynamically consolidates Virtual Machines (VMs) into the minimum number of active servers and then switches the idle servers into a power-saving mode to save energy. However, maintaining the desired level of Quality-of-Service (QoS) between data centers and their users is critical for satisfying users’ expectations concerning performance. Therefore, the main challenge is to minimize the data center energy consumption while maintaining the required QoS. This thesis address this challenge by presenting novel DVMC approaches to reduce the energy consumption of data centers and improve resource utilization under workload independent quality of service constraints. These approaches can be divided into three main categories: heuristic, meta-heuristic and machine learning. Our first contribution is a heuristic algorithm for solving the DVMC problem. The algorithm uses a linear regression-based prediction model to detect over-loaded servers based on the historical utilization data. Then it migrates some VMs from the over-loaded servers to avoid further performance degradations. Moreover, our algorithm consolidates VMs on fewer number of server for energy saving. The second and third contributions are two novel DVMC algorithms based on the Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach. RL is interesting for highly adaptive and autonomous management in dynamic environments. For this reason, we use RL to solve two main sub-problems in VM consolidation. The first sub-problem is the server power mode detection (sleep or active). The second sub-problem is to find an effective solution for server status detection (overloaded or non-overloaded). The fourth contribution of this thesis is an online optimization meta-heuristic algorithm called Ant Colony System-based Placement Optimization (ACS-PO). ACS is a suitable approach for VM consolidation due to the ease of parallelization, that it is close to the optimal solution, and its polynomial worst-case time complexity. The simulation results show that ACS-PO provides substantial improvement over other heuristic algorithms in reducing energy consumption, the number of VM migrations, and performance degradations. Our fifth contribution is a Hierarchical VM management (HiVM) architecture based on a three-tier data center topology which is very common use in data centers. HiVM has the ability to scale across many thousands of servers with energy efficiency. Our sixth contribution is a Utilization Prediction-aware Best Fit Decreasing (UP-BFD) algorithm. UP-BFD can avoid SLA violations and needless migrations by taking into consideration the current and predicted future resource requirements for allocation, consolidation, and placement of VMs. Finally, the seventh and the last contribution is a novel Self-Adaptive Resource Management System (SARMS) in data centers. To achieve scalability, SARMS uses a hierarchical architecture that is partially inspired from HiVM. Moreover, SARMS provides self-adaptive ability for resource management by dynamically adjusting the utilization thresholds for each server in data centers.Siirretty Doriast

Systematic survey on evolution of cloud architectures

Cloud architectures are becoming an active area of research. The quality and durability of a software system are defined by its architecture. The architecture approaches that are used to build cloud-based systems are not available in a blended fashion to achieve an effective universal architecture solution. The paper aims to contribute to the systematic literature review (SLR) to assist researchers who are striving to contribute in this area. The main objective of this review is to systematically identify and analyse the recently published research topics related to software architecture for cloud with regard to research activity, used tools and techniques, proposed approaches, domains. The applied method is SLR based on four selected electronic databases proposed by (Kitchenham and Charters, 2007). Out of 400 classified publications, we regard 121 as relevant for our research domain. We outline taxonomy of their topics and domains, provide lists of used methods and proposed approaches. At present, there is little research coverage on software architectures for cloud, while other disciplines have become more active. The future work is to develop a secure architecture to achieve quality of service and service level agreements

Modern software cybernetics: new trends

Software cybernetics research is to apply a variety of techniques from cybernetics research to software engineering research. For more than fifteen years since 2001, there has been a dramatic increase in work relating to software cybernetics. From cybernetics viewpoint, the work is mainly on the first-order level, namely, the software under observation and control. Beyond the first-order cybernetics, the software, developers/users, and running environments influence each other and thus create feedback to form more complicated systems. We classify software cybernetics as Software Cybernetics I based on the first-order cybernetics, and as Software Cybernetics II based on the higher order cybernetics. This paper provides a review of the literature on software cybernetics, particularly focusing on the transition from Software Cybernetics I to Software Cybernetics II. The results of the survey indicate that some new research areas such as Internet of Things, big data, cloud computing, cyber-physical systems, and even creative computing are related to Software Cybernetics II. The paper identifies the relationships between the techniques of Software Cybernetics II applied and the new research areas to which they have been applied, formulates research problems and challenges of software cybernetics with the application of principles of Phase II of software cybernetics; identifies and highlights new research trends of software cybernetic for further research

ControCity: An Autonomous Approach for Controlling Elasticity Using Buffer Management in Cloud Computing Environment

Cloud computing has been one of the most popular distributed computing paradigms. Elasticity is a crucial feature that distinguishes cloud computing from other distributed computing models. It considers the resource provisioning and allocation processes can be implemented automatically and dynamically. Elasticity feature allows cloud platforms to handle different loads efficiently without disrupting the normal behavior of the application. Therefore, providing a resource elasticity analytical model can play a significant role in cloud resource management. This paper presents Controlling Elasticity (ControCity) framework for controlling resources elasticity through using “buffer management” and “elasticity management”. In the proposed framework, there are two essential components called buffer manager and elasticity manager in the application layer and middleware layer, respectively. The buffer management controls the input queue of the user’s request and the elasticity management controls the elasticity of the cloud platform using learning automata technique. In the application layer, applications are received by cloud applications and, then, placed in the control of the buffer. Buffer manager controls the queue of requests, and elasticity manager of the middleware layer using the learning automata provides a solution for controlling the elasticity of the cloud platform. The experimental results indicate that ControCity reduces the response time by up to 3.7%, and increases the resource utilization and elasticity by up to 8.4% and 5.4%, respectively, compared with the other approaches