Design and evaluation of a hierarchical application placement algorithm in large scale clouds

As the requirements and scale of cloud environments increase, scalable management of the cloud is needed. Centralized solutions lack scalability and fully distributed management systems only have a limited overview of the system. One of the often-studied problems in cloud environments is the application placement problem, used to decide where application instances are instantiated and how many resources to allocate to the instances. In this paper a general approach is introduced for using centralized cloud resource management algorithms in a hierarchical context, increasing the scalability of the management system while maintaining a high placement quality. The management system itself is executed on the cloud, further increasing scalability and robustness. The proposed method uses aggregation techniques to generate input values for a centralized application placement algorithm which is run in all management nodes. Decoupling ensures management nodes can function independently. Subsequently, we compare the performance of hierarchical application placement method with that of a fully centralized algorithm. The results show that a solution, within 5% of the optimum placement when using the centralized algorithm, can be achieved hierarchically in less than 25% of the time needed for execution of the centralized algorithm.