Resource provisioning and scheduling in clouds: QoS perspective

Resource provisioning of appropriate resources to cloud workloads depends on the quality of service (QoS) requirements of cloud applications and is a challenging task. In cloud environment, heterogeneity, uncertainty and dispersion of resources encounter a problem of allocation of resources, which cannot be addressed with existing resource management frameworks. Resource scheduling, if done after efficient resource provisioning, will be more effective and the cloud resources would be scheduled as per the user requirements (QoS) on provisioned resources. Execution of cloud workloads should be as per QoS parameters to fully satisfy the cloud consumer. Therefore, based on QoS parameters, it is mandatory to predict and verify the resource provisioning before actual resource scheduling. In this paper, a resource provisioning and scheduling framework has been presented which caters to provisioned resource distribution and scheduling of resources. Cloud workloads have been re-clustered using k-means-based clustering algorithm after firstly clustering them through workload patterns to identify the QoS requirements of a workload, and then based on identified QoS requirements resources are provisioned before actual scheduling. Further, scheduling has been done based on different scheduling policies. Finally, the performance of the proposed framework has been evaluated in both real and simulated cloud environment and experimental results show that the framework provisions and schedules resource efficiently by considering energy consumption, execution cost and execution time as QoS parameters.