Towards an Autonomic Auto-scaling Prediction System for Cloud Resource Provisioning

This paper investigates the accuracy of predictive auto-scaling systems in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) layer of cloud computing. The hypothesis in this research is that prediction accuracy of auto-scaling systems can be increased by choosing an appropriate time-series prediction algorithm based on the performance pattern over time. To prove this hypothesis, an experiment has been conducted to compare the accuracy of time-series prediction algorithms for different performance patterns. In the experiment, workload was considered as the performance metric, and Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Neural Networks (NN) were utilized as time-series prediction techniques. In addition, we used Amazon EC2 as the experimental infrastructure and TPC-W as the benchmark to generate different workload patterns. The results of the experiment show that prediction accuracy of SVM and NN depends on the incoming workload pattern of the system under study. Specifically, the results show that SVM has better prediction accuracy in the environments with periodic and growing workload patterns, while NN outperforms SVM in forecasting unpredicted workload pattern. Based on these experimental results, this paper proposes an architecture for a self-adaptive prediction suite using an autonomic system approach. This suite can choose the most suitable prediction technique based on the performance pattern, which leads to more accurate prediction results.