Efficient Resource Allocation Strategies for Cloud Data Centers

Abstract: Cloud computing has become a new age technology in enterprises and markets. Clouds allow access to applications and associated data from anywhere. Companies are able to rent resources from cloud for storage and other computational purposes so that their infrastructure cost can be reduced significantly. Further they can make use of company- wide access to applications, based on pay-as-you-go model. Hence there is no need for getting licenses for individual products. However one of the major pitfalls in cloud computing is related to optimizing the resources being allocated. Because of the uniqueness of the model, resource allocation is performed with the objective of minimizing the costs associated with it. The other challenges of resource allocation are meeting customer demands and application requirements. The performance limitations of existing economic allocation models are analysed by defining strategies to reduce the failure and reallocation rate, increase occupancy and thereby increase the obtainable utilization of the system. The high-performance resource utilization strategies presented can be used by market participants without requiring dramatic changes to the allocation protocol. The strategies considered include overbooking, advanced reservation, just-in-time bidding, and using substitute providers for service delivery. The proposed strategies have been implemented in a distributed meta scheduler and evaluated with respect to Grid and cloud deployments.

Keywords: Resource allocation, cloud computing, grid computing, cloud services.