A feedback-control approach for resource management in public clouds

Nowadays, more and more the industry and market depend on cloud-based infrastructures for delivering IT services. To this aim cloud-based infrastructures are changing continuously, increasing their complexity especially for the management of cloud resources. Control and management of resources (e.g., virtual machines, VMs) are of paramount importance to adjust resources automatically allocated to an application and for delivering quality-assured services to final users. In this paper, we propose a feedback-based control approach for the management of VMs in the AWS EC2 public cloud. First, we evaluate the proposed Gain Scheduling policy against different workloads. Second, we provide results on the robustness of the proposed Gain Scheduling policy in presence of failures. Finally, we compare our approach to state-of-the-art control approaches for cloud resources. Our results indicate that the proposed control strategy guarantees, without the need of a priori information on system dynamics or complex estimations of the operating conditions, high performance with respect to both constant and time- varying workloads as well as in spite of sudden VM failures.