A comparison of resource allocation process in grid and cloud technologies

Grid Computing and Cloud Computing are two different technologies that have emerged to validate the long-held dream of computing as utilities which led to an important revolution in IT industry. These technologies came with several challenges in terms of middleware, programming model, resources management and business models. These challenges are seriously considered by Distributed System research. Resources allocation is a key challenge in both technologies as it causes the possible resource wastage and service degradation. This paper is addressing a comprehensive study of the resources allocation processes in both technologies. It provides the researchers with an in-depth understanding of all resources allocation related aspects and associative challenges, including: load balancing, performance, energy consumption, scheduling algorithms, resources consolidation and migration. The comparison also contributes an informal definition of the Cloud resource allocation process. Resources in the Cloud are being shared by all users in a time and space sharing manner, in contrast to dedicated resources that governed by a queuing system in Grid resource management. Cloud Resource allocation suffers from extra challenges abbreviated by achieving good load balancing and making right consolidation decision

Energy-efficient resource allocation scheme based on enhanced flower pollination algorithm for cloud computing data center

Cloud Computing (CC) has rapidly emerged as a successful paradigm for providing ICT infrastructure. Efficient and environmental-friendly resource allocation mechanisms, responsible for allocatinpg Cloud data center resources to execute user applications in the form of requests are undoubtedly required. One of the promising Nature-Inspired techniques for addressing virtualization, consolidation and energyaware problems is the Flower Pollination Algorithm (FPA). However, FPA suffers from entrapment and its static control parameters cannot maintain a balance between local and global search which could also lead to high energy consumption and inadequate resource utilization. This research developed an enhanced FPA-based energy efficient resource allocation scheme for Cloud data center which provides efficient resource utilization and energy efficiency with less probable Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations. Firstly, an Enhanced Flower Pollination Algorithm for Energy-Efficient Virtual Machine Placement (EFPA-EEVMP) was developed. In this algorithm, a Dynamic Switching Probability (DSP) strategy was adopted to balance the local and global search space in FPA used to minimize the energy consumption and maximize resource utilization. Secondly, Multi-Objective Hybrid Flower Pollination Resource Consolidation (MOH-FPRC) algorithm was developed. In this algorithm, Local Neighborhood Search (LNS) and Pareto optimisation strategies were combined with Clustering algorithm to avoid local trapping and address Cloud service providers conflicting objectives such as energy consumption and SLA violation. Lastly, Energy-Aware Multi-Cloud Flower Pollination Optimization (EAM-FPO) scheme was developed for distributed Multi-Cloud data center environment. In this scheme, Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and migration controller were utilised to obtain the optimal solution in a larger search space of the CC environment. The scheme was tested on MultiRecCloudSim simulator. Results of the simulation were compared with OEMACS, ACS-VMC, and EA-DP. The scheme produced outstanding performance improvement rate on the data center energy consumption by 20.5%, resource utilization by 23.9%, and SLA violation by 13.5%. The combined algorithms have reduced entrapment and maintaned balance between local and global search. Therefore, based on the findings the developed scheme has proven to be efficient in minimizing energy consumption while at the same time improving the data center resource allocation with minimum SLA violation

A Firefly Colony and Its Fuzzy Approach for Server Consolidation and Virtual Machine Placement in Cloud Datacenters

Managing cloud datacenters is the most prevailing challenging task ahead for the IT industries. The data centers are considered to be the main source for resource provisioning to the cloud users. Managing these resources to handle large number of virtual machine requests has created the need for heuristic optimization algorithms to provide the optimal placement strategies satisfying the objectives and constraints formulated. In this paper, we propose to apply firefly colony and fuzzy firefly colony optimization algorithms to solve two key issues of datacenters, namely, server consolidation and multiobjective virtual machine placement problem. The server consolidation aims to minimize the count of physical machines used and the virtual machine placement problem is to obtain optimal placement strategy with both minimum power consumption and resource wastage. The proposed techniques exhibit better performance than the heuristics and metaheuristic approaches considered in terms of server consolidation and finding optimal placement strategy

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

Energy-efficient Nature-Inspired techniques in Cloud computing datacenters

Cloud computing is a systematic delivery of computing resources as services to the consumers via the Internet. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the capability provided to the consumer by enabling smarter access to the processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources, where the consumer can deploy and run arbitrary software including operating systems and applications. The resources are sometimes available in the form of Virtual Machines (VMs). Cloud services are provided to the consumers based on the demand, and are billed accordingly. Usually, the VMs run on various datacenters, which comprise of several computing resources consuming lots of energy resulting in hazardous level of carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Several researchers have proposed various energy-efficient methods for reducing the energy consumption in datacenters. One such solutions are the Nature-Inspired algorithms. Towards this end, this paper presents a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art Nature-Inspired algorithms suggested for solving the energy issues in the Cloud datacenters. A taxonomy is followed focusing on three key dimension in the literature including virtualization, consolidation, and energy-awareness. A qualitative review of each techniques is carried out considering key goal, method, advantages, and limitations. The Nature-Inspired algorithms are compared based on their features to indicate their utilization of resources and their level of energy-efficiency. Finally, potential research directions are identified in energy optimization in data centers. This review enable the researchers and professionals in Cloud computing datacenters in understanding literature evolution towards to exploring better energy-efficient methods for Cloud computing datacenters

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

A survey and taxonomy of self-aware and self-adaptive cloud autoscaling systems

Autoscaling system can reconfigure cloud-based services and applications, through various configurations of cloud sofware and provisions of hardware resources, to adapt to the changing environment at runtime. Such a behavior offers the foundation for achieving elasticity in modern cloud computing paradigm. Given the dynamic and uncertain nature of the shared cloud infrastructure, cloud autoscaling system has been engineered as one of the most complex, sophisticated and intelligent artifacts created by human, aiming to achieve self-aware, self-adaptive and dependable runtime scaling. Yet, existing Self-aware and Self-adaptive Cloud Autoscaling System (SSCAS) is not mature to a state that it can be reliably exploited in the cloud. In this article, we survey the state-of-the-art research studies on SSCAS and provide a comprehensive taxonomy for this feld. We present detailed analysis of the results and provide insights on open challenges, as well as the promising directions that are worth investigated in the future work of this area of research. Our survey and taxonomy contribute to the fundamentals of engineering more intelligent autoscaling systems in the cloud