Infrastructure as a service clouds hide the complexity of maintaining the physical infrastructure with a slight disadvantage: they also hide their internal working details. Should users need knowledge about these details e.g., to increase the reliability or performance of their applications, they would need solutions to detect behavioural changes in the underlying system. Existing runtime solutions for such purposes offer limited capabilities as they are mostly restricted to revealing weekly or yearly behavioural periodicity in the infrastructure. This article proposes a technique for predicting generic background workload by means of simulations that are capable of providing additional knowledge of the underlying private cloud systems in order to support activities like cloud orchestration or workflow enactment. Our technique uses long-running scientific workflows and their behaviour discrepancies and tries to replicate these in a simulated cloud with known (trace-based) workloads. We argue that the better we can mimic the current discrepancies the better we can tell expected workloads in the near future on the real life cloud. We evaluated the proposed prediction approach with a biochemical application on both real and simulated cloud infrastructures. The proposed algorithm has shown to produce significantly ( 20 ) better workload predictions for the future of simulated clouds than random workload selection.
@cite_11 also identified performance uncertainties of multi-tenant virtual machine instances over time in Cloud environments. They proposed a model called R-MOHEFT that considered uncertainty intervals for workflow activity processing times. They developed a three-objective (i.e., makespan, monetary cost, and robustness) optimisation for Cloud scheduling in a commercial setting. In contrast to this approach our goal is to identify patterns in earlier workloads to overcome the uncertainty, and apply simulations to predict future background load of the infrastructure.
@cite_11
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Execution of workflow applications in Cloud environments involves many uncertainties because of elastic resource provisioning and unstable performance of multitenant virtual machines (VM) instances over time. These uncertainties are usually either neglected by existing researches, or modeled with some probability distribution function. To address this gap, we extend a multi-objective workflow scheduling algorithm (MOHEFT) in two directions: (1) to deal with the dynamic nature of Cloud environments offering a potentially infinite amount of on-demand resources, and (2) to consider robustness as an objective that mitigates the variability in VM performance over time. Our new robust model, called R-MOHEFT, considers uncertainty in processing times of workflow activities without a precise estimation or known distribution function within an uncertainty interval. We approach this scheduling problem as a three-objective optimisation that considers makespan, monetary cost, and robustness as simultaneous objectives of a commercial Cloud environment. Our new algorithm is able to estimate the Pareto optimal set of scheduling solutions that resist against fluctuations in processing times three times better than its MOHEFT predecessor, with a tradeoff of only 15 worse Pareto frontier. R-MOHEFT's hypervolume suffers by only 5 to 16 , compared to the MOHEFT's drawback of 38 to surprisingly 87 , when the processing time fluctuates up to its double value. Scheduling workflows in cloud service environment has attracted great enthusiasm, and various approaches have been reported up to now. However, these approaches often ignored the uncertainties in the scheduling environment. Ignoring these uncertain factors often leads to the violation of workflow deadlines and increases service renting costs of executing workflows. This study devotes to improving the performance for cloud service platforms by minimizing uncertainty propagation in scheduling workflow applications that have both uncertain task execution time and data transfer time. To be specific, a novel scheduling architecture is designed to control the count of workflow tasks directly waiting on each service instance (e.g., virtual machine). Based on this architecture, we develop an unceRtainty-aware Online Scheduling Algorithm (ROSA) to schedule dynamic and multiple workflows with deadlines. The proposed ROSA skillfully integrates both the proactive and reactive strategies. Then, on the basis of real-world workflow traces, five groups of simulation experiments are carried out to compare ROSA with five typical algorithms. The comparison results reveal that ROSA performs better than the five compared algorithms with respect to costs (up to 56 ), deviation (up to 70 ), resource utilization (up to 37 ) and fairness (up to 37). We consider the classical machine scheduling, where n jobs need to be scheduled on m machines, with the goal of minimizing the makespan, i.e., the maximum load of any machine in the schedule. We study inefficiency of schedules that are obtained when jobs arrive sequentially one by one, and choose themselves the machine on which they will be scheduled. Every job is only interested to be on a machine with a small load (and does not care about the loads of other machines). We measure the inefficiency of a schedule as the ratio of the makespan obtained in the worst-case equilibrium schedule, and of the optimum makespan. This ratio is known as the sequential price of anarchy. We also introduce alternative inefficiency measures, which allow for a favorable choice of the order in which the jobs make their decisions. We first disprove the conjecture of Hassin and Yovel (OR Letters, 2015) claiming that for unrelated machines, i.e., for the setting where every job can have a different processing time on every machine, the sequential price of anarchy for m = 2 machines is at most 3. We provide an answer for the setting with m = 2 and show that the sequential price of anarchy grows at least linearly with the number of players. Furthermore, we show that for a certain order of the jobs, the resulting makespan is at most linearly larger than the optimum makespan. Furthermore, we show that if an authority can change the order of the jobs adaptively to the decisions made by the jobs so far (but cannot influence the decisions of the jobs), then there exists an adaptive ordering in which the jobs end up in an optimum schedule. To the end we consider identical machines, i.e., the setting where every job has the same processing time on every machine, and provide matching lower bound examples to the existing upper bounds on the sequential price of anarchy. We consider a market-based resource allocation model for batch jobs in cloud computing clusters. In our model, we incorporate the importance of the due date of a job rather than the number of servers allocated to it at any given time. Each batch job is characterized by the work volume of total computing units (e.g., CPU hours) along with a bound on maximum degree of parallelism. Users specify, along with these job characteristics, their desired due date and a value for finishing the job by its deadline. Given this specification, the primary goal is to determine the scheduling of cloud computing instances under capacity constraints in order to maximize the social welfare (i.e., sum of values gained by allocated users). Our main result is a new ( C (C-k) ⋅ s (s-1))-approximation algorithm for this objective, where C denotes cloud capacity, k is the maximal bound on parallelized execution (in practical settings, k l C) and s is the slackness on the job completion time i.e., the minimal ratio between a specified deadline and the earliest finish time of a job. Our algorithm is based on utilizing dual fitting arguments over a strengthened linear program to the problem. Based on the new approximation algorithm, we construct truthful allocation and pricing mechanisms, in which reporting the job true value and properties (deadline, work volume and the parallelism bound) is a dominant strategy for all users. To that end, we provide a general framework for transforming allocation algorithms into truthful mechanisms in domains of single-value and multi-properties. We then show that the basic mechanism can be extended under proper Bayesian assumptions to the objective of maximizing revenues, which is important for public clouds. We empirically evaluate the benefits of our approach through simulations on data-center job traces, and show that the revenues obtained under our mechanism are comparable with an ideal fixed-price mechanism, which sets an on-demand price using oracle knowledge of users' valuations. Finally, we discuss how our model can be extended to accommodate uncertainties in job work volumes, which is a practical challenge in cloud settings. Commercial cloud offerings let users allocate compute resources on demand, charging based on reserved time intervals. Users, however, lack guidance for assembling instance pools from different cloud instance types, in order to control completion time and monetary budget. BaTS, our budget-constrained scheduler uses tiny statistical samples of task executions in order to predict completion times (and associated costs) for given bags of tasks, allowing the user to favor either fast execution or low computation budget. BaTS' estimator, however, can not handle variably-priced spot instances appropriately. In this work, we present a new prediction module for BaTS that quickly computes accurate approximations to the Pareto set of mixed on-demand and spot instance pools, based on a genetic algorithm (GA). This new approach allows BaTS to react to changing spot instance prices at runtime by re-configuring the instance pool according to the user's runtime and budget constraints. Simulator-based results show that the GA can approximate the Pareto sets for machine configurations in about 30 seconds time, without noticeable loss of quality, compared to an exact solution, computed offline within 40 to 60 minutes time. The cloud computing is a computing paradigm that users can rent computing resources from service providers as much as they require. A spot instance in cloud computing helps a user to utilize resources with less expensive cost, even if it is unreliable. In this paper, we propose the workflow scheduling scheme that reduces the task waiting time when an instance occurs the out-of-bid situation. And, our scheme executes user’s job within selected instances and expands the suggested user budget. The simulation results reveal that, compared to various instance types, our scheme achieves performance improvements in terms of an average execution time of 66.86 over shortest execution time in each task time interval. And, the cost in our scheme is higher than an instance with low performance and is lower than an instance with high performance. Therefore, our scheme is difficult to optimize cost for task execution. SUMMARY Public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds such as Amazon, GoGrid and Rackspace deliver computational resources by means of virtualisation technologies. These technologies allow multiple independent virtual machines to reside in apparent isolation on the same physical host. Dynamically scaling applications running on IaaS clouds can lead to varied and unpredictable results because of the performance interference effects associated with co-located virtual machines. Determining appropriate scaling policies in a dynamic non-stationary environment is non-trivial. One principle advantage exhibited by IaaS clouds over their traditional hosting counterparts is the ability to scale resources on-demand. However, a problem arises concerning resource allocation as to which resources should be added and removed when the underlying performance of the resource is in a constant state of flux. Decision theoretic frameworks such as Markov Decision Processes are particularly suited to decision making under uncertainty. By applying a temporal difference, reinforcement learning algorithm known as Q-learning, optimal scaling policies can be determined. Additionally, reinforcement learning techniques typically suffer from curse of dimensionality problems, where the state space grows exponentially with each additional state variable. To address this challenge, we also present a novel parallel Q-learning approach aimed at reducing the time taken to determine optimal policies whilst learning online. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. We consider the problem of efficiently scheduling jobs on data centers to minimize the cost of renting machines from "the cloud." In the most basic cloud service model, cloud providers offer computers on demand from large pools installed in data centers. Clients pay for use at an hourly rate. In order to minimize cost, each client needs to decide on the number of machines to be rented and the duration of renting each machine. This suggests the following optimization problem, which we call Rent Minimization. There is a set J= j_1,j_2,...,j_n of n jobs. Job j_i is released at time r_i >= 0, has a deadline of d_i, and requires p_i>0 contiguous processing time, r_i,d_i,p_i in R. The jobs need to be scheduled on identical parallel machines. Machines may be rented for any length of time; however, the cost of renting a machine for l>=0 time units is [l D] (the smallest integer >= l D) dollars, for some given large real D; in particular, one pays dollar 2 whether the machine is rented for D+1 or 2D time units. The goal is to schedule all the jobs in a way that minimizes the incurred rental cost. In this paper, we develop offline and online algorithms for Rent Minimization problem. The algorithms achieve a constant factor approximation for the offline version and O(log(p_max p_min)) for the online version, where p_max and p_min are the maximum and minimum processing time of the jobs respectively. We also show that no deterministic online algorithm can achieve an approximation factor better than log_ 3 (p_max p_min) within a constant factor. Both of these algorithms use the well-studied problem of Machine Minimization as a subroutine. Machine Minimization is a special case of Rent Minimization where D = max_ i d_i . In the process of solving the Rent Minimization problem, in this paper, we also develop the first online algorithm for Machine Minimization. Many cost-conscious public cloud workloads ("tenants") are turning to Amazon EC2's spot instances because, on average, these instances offer significantly lower prices (up to 10 times lower) than on-demand and reserved instances of comparable advertized resource capacities. To use spot instances effectively, a tenant must carefully weigh the lower costs of these instances against their poorer availability. Towards this, we empirically study four features of EC2 spot instance operation that a cost-conscious tenant may find useful to model. Using extensive evaluation based on both historical and current spot instance data, we show shortcomings in the state-of-the-art modeling of these features that we overcome. Our analysis reveals many novel properties of spot instance operation some of which offer predictive value while others do not. Using these insights, we design predictors for our features that offer a balance between computational efficiency (allowing for online resource procurement) and cost-efficacy. We explore "case studies" wherein we implement prototypes of dynamic spot instance procurement advised by our predictors for two types of workloads. Compared to the state-of-the-art, our approach achieves (i) comparable cost but much better performance (fewer bid failures) for a latency-sensitive in-memory Memcached cache, and (ii) an additional 18 cost-savings with comparable (if not better than) performance for a delay-tolerant batch workload. Multi-tenancy is one of the key features of cloud computing, which provides scalability and economic benefits to the end-users and service providers by sharing the same cloud platform and its underlying infrastructure with the isolation of shared network and compute resources. However, resource management in the context of multi-tenant cloud computing is becoming one of the most complex task due to the inherent heterogeneity and resource isolation. This paper proposes a novel cloud-based workflow scheduling (CWSA) policy for compute-intensive workflow applications in multi-tenant cloud computing environments, which helps minimize the overall workflow completion time, tardiness, cost of execution of the workflows, and utilize idle resources of cloud effectively. The proposed algorithm is compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms, i.e., First Come First Served (FCFS), EASY Backfilling, and Minimum Completion Time (MCT) scheduling policies to evaluate the performance. Further, a proof-of-concept experiment of real-world scientific workflow applications is performed to demonstrate the scalability of the CWSA, which verifies the effectiveness of the proposed solution. The simulation results show that the proposed scheduling policy improves the workflow performance and outperforms the aforementioned alternative scheduling policies under typical deployment scenarios. Edge-clouds provide a promising new approach to significantly reduce network operational costs by moving computation closer to the edge. A key challenge in such systems is to decide where and when services should be migrated in response to user mobility and demand variation. The objective is to optimize operational costs while providing rigorous performance guarantees. In this paper, we model this as a sequential decision making Markov Decision Problem (MDP). However, departing from traditional solution methods (such as dynamic programming) that require extensive statistical knowledge and are computationally prohibitive, we develop a novel alternate methodology. First, we establish an interesting decoupling property of the MDP that reduces it to two independent MDPs on disjoint state spaces. Then, using the technique of Lyapunov optimization over renewals, we design an online control algorithm for the decoupled problem that is provably cost-optimal. This algorithm does not require any statistical knowledge of the system parameters and can be implemented efficiently. We validate the performance of our algorithm using extensive trace-driven simulations. Our overall approach is general and can be applied to other MDPs that possess a similar decoupling property. By sharing resources among different cloud providers, the paradigm of federated clouds exploits temporal availability of resources and geographical diversity of operational costs for efficient job service. While interoperability issues across different cloud platforms in a cloud federation have been extensively studied, fundamental questions on cloud economics remain: When and how should a cloud trade resources (e.g., virtual machines) with others, such that its net profit is maximized over the long run, while a close-to-optimal social welfare in the entire federation can also be guaranteed? To answer this question, a number of important, interrelated decisions, including job scheduling, server provisioning, and resource pricing, should be dynamically and jointly made, while the long-term profit optimality is pursued. In this work, we design efficient algorithms for intercloud virtual machine (VM) trading and scheduling in a cloud federation. For VM transactions among clouds, we design a double-auction-based mechanism that is strategy-proof, individual-rational, ex-post budget-balanced, and efficient to execute over time. Closely combined with the auction mechanism is a dynamic VM trading and scheduling algorithm, which carefully decides the true valuations of VMs in the auction, optimally schedules stochastic job arrivals with different service level agreements (SLAs) onto the VMs, and judiciously turns on and off servers based on the current electricity prices. Through rigorous analysis, we show that each individual cloud, by carrying out the dynamic algorithm in the online double auction, can achieve a time-averaged profit arbitrarily close to the offline optimum. Asymptotic optimality in social welfare is also achieved under homogeneous cloud settings. We carry out simulations to verify the effectiveness of our algorithms, and examine the achievable social welfare under heterogeneous cloud settings, as driven by the real-world Google cluster usage traces. We consider the problem of makespan minimization on m unrelated machines in the context of algorithmic mechanism design, where the machines are the strategic players. This is a multidimensional scheduling domain, and the only known positive results for makespan minimization in such a domain are O(m)-approximation truthful mechanisms [22, 20]. We study a well-motivated special case of this problem, where the processing time of a job on each machine may either be "low" or "high", and the low and high values are public and job-dependent. This preserves the multidimensionality of the domain, and generalizes the restricted-machines (i.e., pj,∞ ) setting in scheduling. We give a general technique to convert any c-approximation algorithm to a 3c-approximation truthful-in-expectation mechanism. This is one of the few known results that shows how to export approximation algorithms for a multidimensional problem into truthful mechanisms in a black-box fashion. When the low and high values are the same for all jobs, we devise a deterministic 2-approximation truthful mechanism. These are the first truthful mechanisms with non-trivial performance guarantees for a multidimensional scheduling domain. Our constructions are novel in two respects. First, we do not utilize or rely on explicit price definitions to prove truthfulness; instead we design algorithms that satisfy cycle monotonicity. Cycle monotonicity [23] is a necessary and sufficient condition for truthfulness, is a generalization of value monotonicity for multidimensional domains. However, whereas value monotonicity has been used extensively and successfully to design truthful mechanisms in single-dimensional domains, ours is the first work that leverages cycle monotonicity in the multidimensional setting. Second, our randomized mechanisms are obtained by first constructing a fractional truthful mechanism for a fractional relaxation of the problem, and then converting it into a truthful-in-expectation mechanism. This builds upon a technique of [16], and shows the usefulness of fractional mechanisms in truthful mechanism design. Cloud computing promises high scalability, flexibility and cost-effectiveness to satisfy emerging computing requirements. To efficiently provision computing resources in the cloud, system administrators need the capabilities of characterizing and predicting workload on the Virtual Machines (VMs). In this paper, we use data traces obtained from a real data center to develop such capabilities. First, we search for repeatable workload patterns by exploring cross-VM workload correlations resulted from the dependencies among applications running on different VMs. Treating workload data samples as time series, we develop a co-clustering technique to identify groups of VMs that frequently exhibit correlated workload patterns, and also the time periods in which these VM groups are active. Then, we introduce a method based on Hidden Markov Modeling (HMM) to characterize the temporal correlations in the discovered VM clusters and to predict variations of workload patterns. The experimental results show that our method can not only help better understand group-level workload characteristics, but also make more accurate predictions on workload changes in a cloud. Cloud computing provides an attractive computing paradigm in which computational resources are rented on-demand to users with zero capital and maintenance costs. Cloud providers offer different pricing options to meet computing requirements of a wide variety of applications. An attractive option for batch computing is spot-instances, which allows users to place bids for spare computing instances and rent them at a (often) substantially lower price compared to the fixed on-demand price. However, this raises three main challenges for users: how many instances to rent at any time? what type (on-demand, spot, or both)? and what bid value to use for spot instances? In particular, renting on-demand risks high costs while renting spot instances risks job interruption and delayed completion when the spot market price exceeds the bid. This paper introduces an online learning algorithm for resource allocation to address this fundamental tradeoff between computation cost and performance. Our algorithm dynamically adapts resource allocation by learning from its performance on prior job executions while incorporating history of spot prices and workload characteristics. We provide theoretical bounds on its performance and prove that the average regret of our approach (compared to the best policy in hindsight) vanishes to zero with time. Evaluation on traces from a large datacenter cluster shows that our algorithm outperforms greedy allocation heuristics and quickly converges to a small set of best performing policies. Recently introduced spot instances in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offer low resource costs in exchange for reduced reliability; these instances can be revoked abruptly due to price and demand fluctuations. Mechanisms and tools that deal with the cost-reliability tradeoffs under this schema are of great value for users seeking to lessen their costs while maintaining high reliability. We study how mechanisms, namely, checkpointing and migration, can be used to minimize the cost and volatility of resource provisioning. Based on the real price history of EC2 spot instances, we compare several adaptive checkpointing schemes in terms of monetary costs and improvement of job completion times. We evaluate schemes that apply predictive methods for spot prices. Furthermore, we also study how work migration can improve task completion in the midst of failures while maintaining low monetary costs. Trace-based simulations show that our schemes can reduce significantly both monetary costs and task completion times of computation on spot instance. Current trends in virtualization, green computing, and cloud computing require ever increasing efficiency in consolidating virtual machines without degrading quality of service. In this work, we consider consolidating virtual machines on the minimum number of physical containers (e.g., hosts or racks) in a cloud where the physical network (e.g., network interface or top of the rack switch link) may become a bottleneck. Since virtual machines do not simultaneously use maximum of their nominal bandwidth, the capacity of the physical container can be multiplexed. We assume that each virtual machine has a probabilistic guarantee on realizing its bandwidth Requirements-as derived from its Service Level Agreement with the cloud provider. Therefore, the problem of consolidating virtual machines on the minimum number of physical containers, while preserving these bandwidth allocation guarantees, can be modeled as a Stochastic Bin Packing (SBP) problem, where each virtual machine's bandwidth demand is treated as a random variable. We consider both offline and online versions of SBP. Under the assumption that the virtual machines' bandwidth consumption obeys normal distribution, we show a 2-approximation algorithm for the offline version and improve the previously reported results by presenting a (2 +∈)-competitive algorithm for the online version. We also observe that a dual polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) for SBP can be obtained via reduction to the two-dimensional vector bin packing problem. Finally, we perform a thorough performance evaluation study using both synthetic and real data to evaluate the behavior of our proposed algorithms, showing their practical applicability. Testing and executing large-scale computational applications in public clouds is becoming prevalent due to cost saving, elasticity, and scalability. However, how to increase the reliability and reduce the cost to run large-scale applications in public clouds is still a big challenge. In this paper, we analyzed the pricing schemes of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and found the disturbance effect that the price of the spot instances can be heavily affected due to the large number of spot instances required. We proposed a dynamic approach which schedules and runs large-scale computational applications on a dynamic pool of cloud computational instances. We use hybrid instances, including both on-demand instances for high priority tasks and backup, and spot instances for normal computational tasks so as to further reduce the cost without significantly increasing the completion time. Our proposed method takes the dynamic pricing of cloud instances into consideration, and it reduces the cost and tolerates the failures for running large-scale applications in public clouds. We conducted experimental tests and an agent based Scalable complex System modeling for Sustainable city (S3) application is used to evaluate the scalability, reliability and cost saving. The results show that our proposed method is robust and highly flexible for researchers and users to further reduce cost in real practice. This paper presents a novel economic model to regulate capacity sharing in a federation of hybrid cloud providers (CPs). The proposed work models the interactions among the CPs as a repeated game among selfish players that aim at maximizing their profit by selling their unused capacity in the spot market but are uncertain of future workload fluctuations. The proposed work first establishes that the uncertainty in future revenue can act as a participation incentive to sharing in the repeated game. We, then, demonstrate how an efficient sharing strategy can be obtained via solving a simple dynamic programming problem. The obtained strategy is a simple update rule that depends only on the current workloads and a single variable summarizing past interactions. In contrast to existing approaches, the model incorporates historical and expected future revenue as part of the virtual machine (VM) sharing decision. Moreover, these decisions are not enforced neither by a centralized broker nor by predefined agreements. Rather, the proposed model employs a simple grim trigger strategy where a CP is threatened by the elimination of future VM hosting by other CPs. Simulation results demonstrate the performance of the proposed model in terms of the increased profit and the reduction in the variance in the spot market VM availability and prices. The recent surge in the popularity and usage of Cloud Computing services by both the enterprise and individual consumers has necessitated efficient and proactive management of data center resources which host services having varied characteristics. One of the major issues concerning both the cloud service providers and consumers is the automatic scalability of resources (i.e., compute, storage and bandwidth) in response to the highly unpredictable demands. To this end, an opportunity exists to harness the predictive and diagnostic capabilities of machine learning approaches to incorporate dynamic scaling up and scaling down of resources without violating the Service Level Agreements (SLA) and simultaneously ensuring adequate revenue to the providers. This paper proposes, implements and evaluates a Bayesian Networks based predictive modeling framework to provide for an autonomic scaling of utility computing resources in the Cloud Computing scenario. In essence, the BN-based model captures the historical behavior of the system involving various performance metrics (indicators) and predicts the desired unknown metric (e.g. SLA parameter). Initial simulated experiments involving random demand scenarios provide insights into the feasibility and applicability of the proposed approach for improving the management of present data center facilities.