Optimal Cloud Resource Auto-Scaling for Web Applications

In the on-demand cloud environment, web application providers have the potential to scale virtual resources up or down to achieve cost-effective outcomes. True elasticity and cost-effectiveness in the pay-per-use cloud business model, however, have not yet been achieved. To address this challenge, we propose a novel cloud resource auto-scaling scheme at the virtual machine (VM) level for web application providers. The scheme automatically predicts the number of web requests and discovers an optimal cloud resource demand with cost-latency trade-off. Based on this demand, the scheme makes a resource scaling decision that is up or down or NOP (no operation) in each time-unit re-allocation. We have implemented the scheme on the Amazon cloud platform and evaluated it using three real-world web log datasets. Our experiment results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves resource auto-scaling with an optimal cost-latency trade-off, as well as low SLA violations.