Dynamic workload management in heterogeneous Cloud computing environments

Cloud computing is a paradigm that harnesses massive resource capacity of data centers to support applications in a scalable, flexible, reliable and cost-effective manner. Despite its recent success and rapid adoption in the IT industry, recent literature has shown that effective workload management in cloud computing environments remains to be a difficult challenge. A key reason behind this difficulty is that resources and workloads in production environments are both heterogeneous and dynamic. In particular, large cloud data centers often consist of machines with heterogeneous capacities and performance characteristics. At the same time, cloud workloads often show significant diversity in terms of priority, resource requirements, arrival rate and performance objectives. Consequently, it is difficult to devise heterogeneity and dynamicity-aware management scheme that satisfy diverse application performance objectives, while reducing operational expenses such as energy consumption. This work addresses several key challenges pertaining to dynamic workload management in heterogenous Cloud environments. Specifically, we first present a scheme that place service application across geographically distributed data centers to meet service demand while minimizing total resource usage cost. Then, we design a heterogeneity-aware dynamic application provisioning technique to minimize energy consumption while satisfying performance objectives. Finally, we study the problem of MapReduce scheduling and present a novel scheme that leverages heterogenous run-time task usage characteristics. Through experiments and simulations, we show our proposed solutions can significantly reduce data center energy consumption, while achieving better application performance in terms of service response time and job completion time.