Workload Characterization and Classification: A Step Towards Better Resource Utilization in a Cloud Data Center

Advancements in virtualization technology have led to better utilization of existing infrastructure. It allows numerous virtual machines with different workloads to coexist on the same physical server, resulting in a pool of server resources. It is critical to understand enterprise workloads to correctly create and configure existing and future support in such pools. Managing resources in a cloud data center is one of the most difficult tasks. The dynamic nature of the cloud environment, as well as the high level of uncertainty, has created these challenges. These applications’ diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements make data center management difficult. Accurate forecasting of future resource demand is required to meet QoS needs and ensure better resource utilization. Consequently, data center workload modeling and categorization are needed to meet software quality solutions cost-effectively. This paper uses traces of Bitbrain’s data to characterize and categorize workload. Clustering (K Means and Gaussian mixture model) and Classification strategies (K Nearest Neighbors, Logistic Regression, Decision Trees, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machine) characterize and model the workload traces. K Means shows better results as compared to GMM when compared to the Calinski Harabasz index and Davies-Bouldin score. The results showed that the Decision Tree achieves the maximum accuracy of 99.18%, followed by K Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM) Logistic Regression (LR), Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), and Back Propagation Neural Networks.