An Analysis of Provisioning and Allocation Policies for Infrastructure-as-a-Service Clouds

• Main Authors: Villegas, David, Antoniou, Athanasios, Sadjadi, Seyed Masoud, Iosup, Alexandru
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: allocation policies; Analytical models; Cloud computing; Computer systems organization; Computer systems organization > Dependable and fault-tolerant systems and networks; Context; Educational institutions; empirical performance analysis; General and reference; General and reference > Cross-computing tools and techniques; General and reference > Cross-computing tools and techniques > Performance; Measurement; Networks; Networks > Network performance evaluation; provisioning policies; Resource management; Runtime; Scheduling; Social and professional topics; Social and professional topics > Professional topics; Social and professional topics > Professional topics > Computing profession; Social and professional topics > Professional topics > Computing profession > Testing, certification and licensing; Software and its engineering; Software and its engineering > Software organization and properties; Software and its engineering > Software organization and properties > Software system structures; Software and its engineering > Software organization and properties > Software system structures > Distributed systems organizing principles
• DOI: 10.1109/CCGrid.2012.46

Today, many commercial and private cloud computing providers offer resources for leasing under the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) paradigm. Although an abundance of mechanisms already facilitate the lease and use of single infrastructure resources, to complete multi-job workloads IaaS users still need to select adequate provisioning and allocation policies to instantiate resources and map computational jobs to them. While such policies have been studied in the past, no experimental investigation in the context of clouds currently exists that considers them jointly. In this paper we present a comprehensive and empirical performance-cost analysis of provisioning and allocation policies in IaaS clouds. We first introduce a taxonomy of both types of policies, based on the type of information used in the decision process, and map to this taxonomy eight provisioning and four allocation policies. Then, we analyze the performance and cost of these policies through experimentation in three clouds, including Amazon EC2. We show that policies that dynamically provision and/or allocate resources can achieve better performance and cost. Finally, we also look at the interplay between provisioning and allocation, for which we show preliminary results.