Load Balancing and Virtual Machine Allocation in Cloud-based Data Centers

As cloud services see an exponential increase in consumers, the demand for faster processing of data and a reliable delivery of services becomes a pressing concern. This puts a lot of pressure on the cloud-based data centers, where the consumers’ data is stored, processed and serviced. The rising demand for high quality services and the constrained environment, make load balancing within the cloud data centers a vital concern. This project aims to achieve load balancing within the data centers by means of implementing a Virtual Machine allocation policy, based on consensus algorithm technique. The cloud-based data center system, consisting of Virtual Machines has been simulated on CloudSim – a Java based cloud simulator

A Performance Analysis of a Typical Server running on a Cloud

In recent years, Cloud computing has become very popular from individuals to big enterprises because of the reduced cost, minimal management effort etc. Cloud providers like Amazon, Google are now offering resources for web deployment, storage, servers etc. However, due to the varying load and cost, evaluating the performance of task scheduling policies in these real Cloud environments is very challenging. In this paper, the performance of Earliest Deadline First (EDF) scheduling policy has been investigated using CloudSim and the hardware configuration of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with the time-out of a web and FTP servers. In addition, a comparison between space-shared and time-shared task provisioning policies have been examined which shows that the average execution time can be minimised by using space-shared policy in both AWS and GCP

A Survey on Load Balancing Algorithms for VM Placement in Cloud Computing

The emergence of cloud computing based on virtualization technologies brings huge opportunities to host virtual resource at low cost without the need of owning any infrastructure. Virtualization technologies enable users to acquire, configure and be charged on pay-per-use basis. However, Cloud data centers mostly comprise heterogeneous commodity servers hosting multiple virtual machines (VMs) with potential various specifications and fluctuating resource usages, which may cause imbalanced resource utilization within servers that may lead to performance degradation and service level agreements (SLAs) violations. To achieve efficient scheduling, these challenges should be addressed and solved by using load balancing strategies, which have been proved to be NP-hard problem. From multiple perspectives, this work identifies the challenges and analyzes existing algorithms for allocating VMs to PMs in infrastructure Clouds, especially focuses on load balancing. A detailed classification targeting load balancing algorithms for VM placement in cloud data centers is investigated and the surveyed algorithms are classified according to the classification. The goal of this paper is to provide a comprehensive and comparative understanding of existing literature and aid researchers by providing an insight for potential future enhancements.Comment: 22 Pages, 4 Figures, 4 Tables, in pres

Efficient Task Scheduling and Fair Load Distribution Among Federated Clouds

The federated cloud is the future generation of cloud computing, allowing sharing of computing and storage resources, and servicing of user tasks among cloud providers through a centralized control mechanism. However, a great challenge lies in the efficient management of such federated clouds and fair distribution of the load among heterogeneous cloud providers. In our proposed approach, called QPFS_MASG, at the federated cloud level, the incoming tasks queue are partitioned in order to achieve a fair distribution of the load among all cloud providers of the federated cloud. Then, at the cloud level, task scheduling using the Modified Activity Selection by Greedy (MASG) technique assigns the tasks to different virtual machines (VMs), considering the task deadline as the key factor in achieving good quality of service (QoS). The proposed approach takes care of servicing tasks within their deadline, reducing service level agreement (SLA) violations, improving the response time of user tasks as well as achieving fair distribution of the load among all participating cloud providers. The QPFS_MASG was implemented using CloudSim and the evaluation result revealed a guaranteed degree of fairness in service distribution among the cloud providers with reduced response time and SLA violations compared to existing approaches. Also, the evaluation results showed that the proposed approach serviced the user tasks with minimum number of VMs

MACHS: Mitigating the Achilles Heel of the Cloud through High Availability and Performance-aware Solutions

Cloud computing is continuously growing as a business model for hosting information and communication technology applications. However, many concerns arise regarding the quality of service (QoS) offered by the cloud. One major challenge is the high availability (HA) of cloud-based applications. The key to achieving availability requirements is to develop an approach that is immune to cloud failures while minimizing the service level agreement (SLA) violations. To this end, this thesis addresses the HA of cloud-based applications from different perspectives. First, the thesis proposes a component’s HA-ware scheduler (CHASE) to manage the deployments of carrier-grade cloud applications while maximizing their HA and satisfying the QoS requirements. Second, a Stochastic Petri Net (SPN) model is proposed to capture the stochastic characteristics of cloud services and quantify the expected availability offered by an application deployment. The SPN model is then associated with an extensible policy-driven cloud scoring system that integrates other cloud challenges (i.e. green and cost concerns) with HA objectives. The proposed HA-aware solutions are extended to include a live virtual machine migration model that provides a trade-off between the migration time and the downtime while maintaining HA objective. Furthermore, the thesis proposes a generic input template for cloud simulators, GITS, to facilitate the creation of cloud scenarios while ensuring reusability, simplicity, and portability. Finally, an availability-aware CloudSim extension, ACE, is proposed. ACE extends CloudSim simulator with failure injection, computational paths, repair, failover, load balancing, and other availability-based modules