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

Energy-Efficient Management of Data Center Resources for Cloud Computing: A Vision, Architectural Elements, and Open Challenges

Cloud computing is offering utility-oriented IT services to users worldwide. Based on a pay-as-you-go model, it enables hosting of pervasive applications from consumer, scientific, and business domains. However, data centers hosting Cloud applications consume huge amounts of energy, contributing to high operational costs and carbon footprints to the environment. Therefore, we need Green Cloud computing solutions that can not only save energy for the environment but also reduce operational costs. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements for energy-efficient management of Cloud computing environments. We focus on the development of dynamic resource provisioning and allocation algorithms that consider the synergy between various data center infrastructures (i.e., the hardware, power units, cooling and software), and holistically work to boost data center energy efficiency and performance. In particular, this paper proposes (a) architectural principles for energy-efficient management of Clouds; (b) energy-efficient resource allocation policies and scheduling algorithms considering quality-of-service expectations, and devices power usage characteristics; and (c) a novel software technology for energy-efficient management of Clouds. We have validated our approach by conducting a set of rigorous performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results demonstrate that 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: 12 pages, 5 figures,Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications (PDPTA 2010), Las Vegas, USA, July 12-15, 201

Cloud Computing Systems Exploration over Workload Prediction Factor in Distributed Applications

This paper highlights the different techniques of workload prediction in cloud computing. Cloud computing resources have a special kind of arrangement in which resources are made available on demand to the customers. Today, most of the organizations are using cloud computing that results in reduction of the operational cost. Cloud computing also reduces the overhead of any organization due to implementation of many hardware and software platforms. These services are being provided by cloud provider on the basis of pay per use. There are lots of cloud service providers in the modern era. In this competitive era, every cloud provider works to provide better services to the customer. To fulfill the customer?s requirements, dynamic provisioning can serve the purpose in cloud system where resources can be released and allocated on later stage as per needs. That?s why resource scaling becomes a great challenge for the cloud providers. There are many approaches to scale the number of instances of any resource. Two main approaches namely: proactive and reactive are used in cloud systems. Reactive approach reacts at later stage while proactive approach predicts resources in advance. Cloud provider needs to predict the number of resources in advance that an application is intended to use. Historical data and patterns can be used for the workload prediction. The benefit of the proactive approach lies in advance number of instances of a resource available for the future use. This results in improved performance for the cloud systems

Variability in Behavior of Application Service Workload in a Utility Cloud

Using the elasticity feature of a utility cloud, users can acquire and release resources as required and pay for what they use. Applications with time-varying workloads can request for variable resources over time that makes cloud a convenient option for such applications. The elasticity in current IaaS cloud provides mainly two options to the users: horizontal and vertical scaling. In both ways of scaling the basic resource allocation unit is fixed-sized VM, it forces the cloud users to characterize their workload based on VM size, which might lead to under-utilization or over-allocation of resources. This turns out to be an inefficient model for both cloud users and providers. In this paper we discuss and calculate the variability in different kinds of application service workload. We also discuss different dynamic provisioning approaches proposed by researchers. We conclude with a brief introduction to the issues or limitations in existing solutions and our approach to resolve them in a way that is suitable and economic for both cloud user and provider

Toward sustainable data centers: a comprehensive energy management strategy

Data centers are major contributors to the emission of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and this contribution is expected to increase in the following years. This has encouraged the development of techniques to reduce the energy consumption and the environmental footprint of data centers. Whereas some of these techniques have succeeded to reduce the energy consumption of the hardware equipment of data centers (including IT, cooling, and power supply systems), we claim that sustainable data centers will be only possible if the problem is faced by means of a holistic approach that includes not only the aforementioned techniques but also intelligent and unifying solutions that enable a synergistic and energy-aware management of data centers. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive strategy to reduce the carbon footprint of data centers that uses the energy as a driver of their management procedures. In addition, we present a holistic management architecture for sustainable data centers that implements the aforementioned strategy, and we propose design guidelines to accomplish each step of the proposed strategy, referring to related achievements and enumerating the main challenges that must be still solved.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Adaptive prediction models for data center resources utilization estimation

Accurate estimation of data center resource utilization is a challenging task due to multi-tenant co-hosted applications having dynamic and time-varying workloads. Accurate estimation of future resources utilization helps in better job scheduling, workload placement, capacity planning, proactive auto-scaling, and load balancing. The inaccurate estimation leads to either under or over-provisioning of data center resources. Most existing estimation methods are based on a single model that often does not appropriately estimate different workload scenarios. To address these problems, we propose a novel method to adaptively and automatically identify the most appropriate model to accurately estimate data center resources utilization. The proposed approach trains a classifier based on statistical features of historical resources usage to decide the appropriate prediction model to use for given resource utilization observations collected during a specific time interval. We evaluated our approach on real datasets and compared the results with multiple baseline methods. The experimental evaluation shows that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches and delivers 6% to 27% improved resource utilization estimation accuracy compared to baseline methods.This work is partially supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the EU Horizon 2020 programme (GA 639595), the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (TIN2015-65316-P and IJCI2016-27485), the Generalitat de Catalunya (2014-SGR-1051), and NPRP grant # NPRP9-224-1-049 from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation) and University of the Punjab, Pakistan.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

SGA Model for Prediction in Cloud Environment

With virtual information, cloud computing has made applications available to users everywhere. Efficient asset workload forecasting could help the cloud achieve maximum resource utilisation. The effective utilization of resources and the reduction of datacentres power both depend heavily on load forecasting. The allocation of resources and task scheduling issues in clouds and virtualized systems are significantly impacted by CPU utilisation forecast. A resource manager uses utilisation projection to distribute workload between physical nodes, improving resource consumption effectiveness. When performing a virtual machine distribution job, a good estimation of CPU utilization enables the migration of one or more virtual servers, preventing the overflow of the real machineries. In a cloud system, scalability and flexibility are crucial characteristics. Predicting workload and demands would aid in optimal resource utilisation in a cloud setting. To improve allocation of resources and the effectiveness of the cloud service, workload assessment and future workload forecasting could be performed. The creation of an appropriate statistical method has begun. In this study, a simulation approach and a genetic algorithm were used to forecast workloads. In comparison to the earlier techniques, it is anticipated to produce results that are superior by having a lower error rate and higher forecasting reliability. The suggested method is examined utilizing statistics from the Bit brains datacentres. The study then analyses, summarises, and suggests future study paths in cloud environments