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

Cloud computing resource scheduling and a survey of its evolutionary approaches

A disruptive technology fundamentally transforming the way that computing services are delivered, cloud computing offers information and communication technology users a new dimension of convenience of resources, as services via the Internet. Because cloud provides a finite pool of virtualized on-demand resources, optimally scheduling them has become an essential and rewarding topic, where a trend of using Evolutionary Computation (EC) algorithms is emerging rapidly. Through analyzing the cloud computing architecture, this survey first presents taxonomy at two levels of scheduling cloud resources. It then paints a landscape of the scheduling problem and solutions. According to the taxonomy, a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art approaches is presented systematically. Looking forward, challenges and potential future research directions are investigated and invited, including real-time scheduling, adaptive dynamic scheduling, large-scale scheduling, multiobjective scheduling, and distributed and parallel scheduling. At the dawn of Industry 4.0, cloud computing scheduling for cyber-physical integration with the presence of big data is also discussed. Research in this area is only in its infancy, but with the rapid fusion of information and data technology, more exciting and agenda-setting topics are likely to emerge on the horizon

Autonomous migration of vertual machines for maximizing resource utilization

Virtualization of computing resources enables multiple virtual machines to run on a physical machine. When many virtual machines are deployed on a cluster of PCs, some physical machines will inevitably experience overload while others are under-utilized over time due to varying computational demands. This computational imbalance across the cluster undermines the very purpose of maximizing resource utilization through virtualization. To solve this imbalance problem, virtual machine migration has been introduced, where a virtual machine on a heavily loaded physical machine is selected and moved to a lightly loaded physical machine. The selection of the source virtual machine and the destination physical machine is based on a single fixed threshold value. Key to such threshold-based VM migration is to determine when to move which VM to what physical machine, since wrong or inadequate decisions can cause unnecessary migrations that would adversely affect the overall performance. The fixed threshold may not necessarily work for different computing infrastructures. Finding the optimal threshold is critical. In this research, a virtual machine migration framework is presented that autonomously finds and adjusts variable thresholds at runtime for different computing requirements to improve and maximize the utilization of computing resources. Central to this approach is the previous history of migrations and their effects before and after each migration in terms of standard deviation of utilization. To broaden this research, a proactive learning methodology is introduced that not only accumulates the past history of computing patterns and resulting migration decisions but more importantly searches all possibilities for the most suitable decisions. This research demonstrates through experimental results that the learning approach autonomously finds thresholds close to the optimal ones for different computing scenarios and that such varying thresholds yield an optimal number of VM migrations for maximizing resource utilization. The proposed framework is set up on a cluster of 8 and 16 PCs, each of which has multiple User-Mode Linux (UML)-based virtual machines. An extensive set of benchmark programs is deployed to closely resemble a real-world computing environment. Experimental results indicate that the proposed framework indeed autonomously finds thresholds close to the optimal ones for different computing scenarios, balances the load across the cluster through autonomous VM migration, and improves the overall performance of the dynamically changing computing environment

A Survey on Auto Live Migration Mechanism in Cloud Environment

Cloud Computing has recently emerged as a compelling paradigm for delivering computing services to users as utilities in a pay-as-you-go manner over the internet. Virtualization is a key concept in cloud computing. Virtualization technology refers to the creation of a virtual machine that acts like a real hardware with an operating system. Live migration is the task of moving a virtual machine from one physical hardware environment to another without disconnecting the client. Its facilities for efficient utilization of resources (CPU, memory, Storage) to manage load imbalance problem and also useful for reduction in energy consumption and fault management. For live migration of the virtual machine cloud provider needs to monitor the resources of all hosts continuously. So there are techniques for automation of this live migration when required. This method is called auto live migration techniques. This paper presents a detailed survey on Auto Live Migration of Virtual machines (VM) in cloud computing

Adaptive Energy-Optimized Consolidation Algorithm

We have been hearing about cloud computing for quite a long time now. This type of computing is booming and emerging as a popular computing paradigm for its scalability and flexibility in nature. Cloud computing provides the provision of service on-demand, on-demand resources supply and services to end-users. However, energy consumption and energy wastage are becoming a major concern for cloud providers due to its direct impression on costs required for operations and carbon emissions. To tackle this issue, Adaptive Energy-Optimized Consolidation Algorithm has been proposed to efficiently manage energy consumption in cloud environments. This algorithm involves sharing by dividing, in this process resource allocation is done into two different phases, those are, consolidation of tasks and consolidation of resources. Compared to single-task consolidation algorithms, the proposed two-phase Adaptive energy optimized consolidation algorithm shows improved performance in terms of energy efficiency and resource utilization. The results of experiments conducted using a cloud-sim show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in decreasing energy consumption while maintaining the quality-of-service requirements of computing in cloud.  The need for an hour is to automate things without human intervention. Thus, using Autonomous computing refers to a type of computing system that is capable of performing tasks and making decisions without the intervention of humans. This type of system typically relies on Artificial.Intelligence, Machine.Learning, and other futuristic technologies to study the data, identify patterns, and make decisions based on that data. Cloud computing can certainly be incorporated into an autonomous computing system. The performance of an automated computing environment depends on a various factor, considering the quality of the different algorithms used, also the amount and quality of various data available to the system, the computational resources available, and the system's ability to learn and adapt over time. However, by incorporating cloud computing, an autonomous computing system can potentially access more resources and process data more quickly, which can improve its overall performance