Fast and Dynamic Resource Provisioning for Quality Critical Cloud Applications

As many quality critical applications are migrating to clouds, Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) have become vital properties for cloud applications. Therefore, the provisioning mechanism, which aims to make the virtual infrastructure recover from sudden failures quickly or adapt dynamic properties of applications, is essential. However, most current provisioning mechanisms focus on the cloud provider and are developed for specific hardware. This paper proposes a mechanism to partition a customer's cloud resource requests efficiently across multiple domains or clouds, while ensuring that the partitions are still connected with each other. This mechanism exploits networked infrastructure to make dynamic cloud resource provisioning as fast as possible. It works using a broker-based model that is transparent both to the customer and to the cloud provider. It is easy for customers to use and does not force providers to make any changes to their services. Moreover, the dynamic property makes the provisioned infrastructure better able to recover from failures quickly. We implement the mechanism and carry out experiments on ExoGENI, a networked infrastructure-as-a-service (NIaaS) platform. Comprehensive experimental results and theoretical analysis demonstrate that the mechanism we propose is feasible and can dramatically improve the speed of resource provisioning.