Resource Provisioning in the Cloud

It is a challenge to provision and allocate resources in the Cloud so as to meet both the performance and cost goals of Cloud users. For a Cloud consumer, the ability to acquire and release resources dynamically and trivially in the Cloud, while being a powerful and useful aspect, complicates the resource provisioning and allocation task in the Cloud. While on the one hand, resource under-provisioning may hurt application performance and deteriorate service quality; on the other hand, resource over-provisioning could cost users more and offset Cloud advantages. Although resource management and job scheduling have been studied extensively in the Grid environments and the Cloud shares many common features with the Grid, the mapping from user objectives to resource provisioning and allocation in the Cloud has many challenges due to the seemingly unlimited resource pools, virtualization, and isolation features provided by the Cloud. This chapter focuses on surveying the research trends in resource provisioning in the Cloud based on several factors such as the type of the workload, the VM heterogeneity, data transfer requirements, solution methods, and optimization goals and constraints, and attempts to provide guidelines for future research.