5,385 research outputs found
InterCloud: Utility-Oriented Federation of Cloud Computing Environments for Scaling of Application Services
Cloud computing providers have setup several data centers at different
geographical locations over the Internet in order to optimally serve needs of
their customers around the world. However, existing systems do not support
mechanisms and policies for dynamically coordinating load distribution among
different Cloud-based data centers in order to determine optimal location for
hosting application services to achieve reasonable QoS levels. Further, the
Cloud computing providers are unable to predict geographic distribution of
users consuming their services, hence the load coordination must happen
automatically, and distribution of services must change in response to changes
in the load. To counter this problem, we advocate creation of federated Cloud
computing environment (InterCloud) that facilitates just-in-time,
opportunistic, and scalable provisioning of application services, consistently
achieving QoS targets under variable workload, resource and network conditions.
The overall goal is to create a computing environment that supports dynamic
expansion or contraction of capabilities (VMs, services, storage, and database)
for handling sudden variations in service demands.
This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of
InterCloud for utility-oriented federation of Cloud computing environments. The
proposed InterCloud environment supports scaling of applications across
multiple vendor clouds. We have validated our approach by conducting a set of
rigorous performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results
demonstrate that federated Cloud computing model has immense potential as it
offers significant performance gains as regards to response time and cost
saving under dynamic workload scenarios.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, conference pape
A Reliable and Cost-Efficient Auto-Scaling System for Web Applications Using Heterogeneous Spot Instances
Cloud providers sell their idle capacity on markets through an auction-like
mechanism to increase their return on investment. The instances sold in this
way are called spot instances. In spite that spot instances are usually 90%
cheaper than on-demand instances, they can be terminated by provider when their
bidding prices are lower than market prices. Thus, they are largely used to
provision fault-tolerant applications only. In this paper, we explore how to
utilize spot instances to provision web applications, which are usually
considered availability-critical. The idea is to take advantage of differences
in price among various types of spot instances to reach both high availability
and significant cost saving. We first propose a fault-tolerant model for web
applications provisioned by spot instances. Based on that, we devise novel
auto-scaling polices for hourly billed cloud markets. We implemented the
proposed model and policies both on a simulation testbed for repeatable
validation and Amazon EC2. The experiments on the simulation testbed and the
real platform against the benchmarks show that the proposed approach can
greatly reduce resource cost and still achieve satisfactory Quality of Service
(QoS) in terms of response time and availability
Autonomic Cloud Computing: Open Challenges and Architectural Elements
As Clouds are complex, large-scale, and heterogeneous distributed systems,
management of their resources is a challenging task. They need automated and
integrated intelligent strategies for provisioning of resources to offer
services that are secure, reliable, and cost-efficient. Hence, effective
management of services becomes fundamental in software platforms that
constitute the fabric of computing Clouds. In this direction, this paper
identifies open issues in autonomic resource provisioning and presents
innovative management techniques for supporting SaaS applications hosted on
Clouds. We present a conceptual architecture and early results evidencing the
benefits of autonomic management of Clouds.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, conference keynote pape
Reliable Provisioning of Spot Instances for Compute-intensive Applications
Cloud computing providers are now offering their unused resources for leasing
in the spot market, which has been considered the first step towards a
full-fledged market economy for computational resources. Spot instances are
virtual machines (VMs) available at lower prices than their standard on-demand
counterparts. These VMs will run for as long as the current price is lower than
the maximum bid price users are willing to pay per hour. Spot instances have
been increasingly used for executing compute-intensive applications. In spite
of an apparent economical advantage, due to an intermittent nature of biddable
resources, application execution times may be prolonged or they may not finish
at all. This paper proposes a resource allocation strategy that addresses the
problem of running compute-intensive jobs on a pool of intermittent virtual
machines, while also aiming to run applications in a fast and economical way.
To mitigate potential unavailability periods, a multifaceted fault-aware
resource provisioning policy is proposed. Our solution employs price and
runtime estimation mechanisms, as well as three fault tolerance techniques,
namely checkpointing, task duplication and migration. We evaluate our
strategies using trace-driven simulations, which take as input real price
variation traces, as well as an application trace from the Parallel Workload
Archive. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of executing applications on
spot instances, respecting QoS constraints, despite occasional failures.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure
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