Exploiting Heterogeneity for Opportunistic Resource Scaling in Cloud-Hosted Applications

Cloud consumers have access to an increasingly diverse range of resource and contract options, but lack appropriate resource scaling solutions that can exploit this to minimize the cost of their cloud-hosted applications. Traditional approaches tend to use homogeneous resources and horizontal scaling to handle workload fluctuations and do not leverage resource and contract heterogeneity to optimize cloud costs. In this paper, we propose a novel opportunistic resource scaling approach that exploits both resource and contract heterogeneity to achieve cost-effective resource allocations. We model resource allocation as an unbounded knapsack problem, and resource scaling as an one-step ahead resource allocation problem. Based on these models, we propose two scaling strategies: (a) delta capacity optimization, which focuses on optimizing costs for the difference between existing resource allocation and the required capacity based on the forecast workload, and (b) full capacity optimization, which focuses on optimizing costs for resource capacity corresponding to the forecast workload. We evaluate both strategies using two real world workload datasets, and compare them against three different scaling strategies. The results show that our proposed approach, particularly full capacity optimization, outperforms all of them and offers in excess of 70 percent cost savings compared to the traditional scaling approach. Refereed/Peer-reviewed