Scheduling Policies for Minimizing Job Migration and Server Running Costs for Cloud Computing Platforms

We propose job scheduling algorithms to minimize job migration and server running costs in cloud computing platforms offering Infrastructure as a Service. We first consider algorithms that assume knowledge of job-size on arrival of jobs. We characterize the optimal cost subject to system stability. We develop a drift-plus-penalty framework based algorithm that can achieve optimal cost arbitrarily closely. Specifically this algorithm yields a trade-off between delay and costs. We then relax the job-size knowledge assumption and give an algorithm that uses readily offered service to the jobs. We show that this algorithm gives order-wise identical cost as the job size based algorithm. We illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithms and compare these to the existing algorithms via simulation.