Automated control in cloud computing: challenges and opportunities

With advances in virtualization technology, virtual machine services offered by cloud utility providers are becoming increasingly powerful, anchoring the ecosystem of cloud services. Virtual computing services are attractive in part because they enable customers to acquire and release computing resources for guest applications adaptively in response to load surges and other dynamic behaviors. ``Elastic'' cloud computing APIs present a natural opportunity for feedback controllers to automate this adaptive resource provisioning, and many recent works have explored feedback control policies for a variety of network services under various assumptions. This paper addresses the challenge of building an effective controller as a customer add-on outside of the cloud utility service itself. Such external controllers must function within the constraints of the utility service APIs. It is important to consider techniques for effective feedback control using cloud APIs, as well as how to design those APIs to enable more effective control. As one example, we explore proportional thresholding, a policy enhancement for feedback controllers that enables stable control across a wide range of guest cluster sizes using the coarse-grained control offered by popular virtual compute cloud services.