An online cost-efficient scheduler for requests with deadline constraint in hybrid clouds

The hybrid cloud model has received considerable attention in recent years. However, it is challenging to schedule computing applications in hybrid clouds because of the various product types and pricing models provided by different cloud providers in conjunction with the complexity of private cloud resource management. In this paper, we focus on a typical scenario to schedule computing requests in hybrid clouds, trying to minimize the costs incurred while keeping the deadline missing of the requests at an acceptable level. We formulate this problem as an online optimization model originally, and by taking advantage of the Lyapunov optimization techniques, we transform it into a one-shot binary linear optimization problem which is much easier to solve. Based on that we develop a hybrid cloud scheduler, and simulation results suggest that our scheduler strikes a good balance between the cost of public clouds and the deadline missing of computing requests. Besides, the proposed scheduler shows a nearly optimal resource utilization rate and a good average scheduling delay.