Control‐Based Approaches to Dynamic Resource Management in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing paradigm provides a range of attractive features such as resource elasticity, cost efficiency, and ease of management. Although much progress has been made in the dynamic resource management using control-based approaches in cloud computing environments, there are two significant research challenges. First, only single metric like mean response time (MRT) has been considered in the study of quality of service in individual applications. Second, to evaluate the performance of dynamic controllers, a single benchmark application is usually utilized in the previous work although the application may be driven by different synthetic workloads or utilization traces collected from production environment. This chapter analyses these two issues through experiments on a test bed with multi-tier applications hosted on multiple virtual machines. It evaluates the relationship between resource utilization and MRT for a three-tier application when the CPU shares of the virtual machines (VMs) are dynamically tuned through the utilization controllers.