Cost-Efficient Virtual Machine Provisioning for Multi-tier Web Applications and Video Transcoding

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds provide virtual machines (VMs) under the pay-per-use business model. The dynamic on-demand provisioning of VMs allows IaaS users to ensure scalability of their web applications and web-based services from really low to really high loads. However, VM provisioning must be done carefully because over-provisioning results in an increased operational cost, while under-provisioning leads to a sub par service. In this research work, our main focus is on cost-efficient VM provisioning for multi-tier web applications and video transcoding. Moreover, to prevent provisioned VMs from becoming overloaded, we augment VM provisioning with an admission control mechanism. Similarly, to ensure efficient use of provisioned VMs, under-utilized VMs are consolidated periodically. Since cost-efficient VM provisioning is an optimization problem, we apply metaheuristic approaches to find a near-optimal solution.