Integrated and autonomic cloud resource scaling

Abstract

A Cloud is a very dynamic environment where resources offered by a Cloud Service Provider (CSP), out of one or more Cloud Data Centers (DCs) are acquired or released (by an enterprise (tenant) on-demand and at any scale. Typically a tenant will use Cloud service interfaces to acquire or release resources directly. This process can be automated by a CSP by providing auto-scaling capability where a tenant sets policies indicating under what condition resources should be auto-scaled. This is specially needed in a Cloud environment because of the huge scale at which a Cloud operates. Typical solutions are naïve causing spurious auto-scaling decisions. For example, they are based on only thresholding triggers and the thresholding mechanisms themselves are not Cloud-ready. In a Cloud, resources from three separate domains, compute, storage and network, are acquired or released on-demand. But in typical solutions resources from these three domains are not auto-scaled in an integrated fashion. Integrated auto-scaling prevents further spurious scaling and reduces the number of auto-scaling systems to be supported in a Cloud management system. In addition, network resources typically are not auto-scaled. In this paper we describe a Cloud resource auto-scaling system that addresses and overcomes above limitations.