URL: A unified reinforcement learning approach for autonomic cloud management

Cloud computing is emerging as an increasingly important service-oriented computing paradigm. Management is a key to providing accurate service availability and performance data, as well as enabling real-time provisioning that automatically provides the capacity needed to meet service demands. In this paper, we present a unified reinforcement learning approach, namely URL, to automate the configuration processes of virtualized machines and appliances running in the virtual machines. The approach lends itself to the application of real-time autoconfiguration of clouds. It also makes it possible to adapt the VM resource budget and appliance parameter settings to the cloud dynamics and the changing workload to provide service quality assurance. In particular, the approach has the flexibility to make a good trade-off between system-wide utilization objectives and appliance-specific SLA optimization goals. Experimental results on Xen VMs with various workloads demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach. It can drive the system into an optimal or near-optimal configuration setting in a few trial-and-error iterations.