Online scheduling of deadline‐constrained bag‐of‐task workloads on hybrid clouds

Abstract

Summary The advent of hybrid cloud technologies and public Infrastructures as a Service (IaaS) allows service developers to offer services to their customers with little upfront investment and to adapt services to different workload sizes. The problem of minimizing the costs of the hired public infrastructure while providing the quality of service needed by the final customer arises when using hybrid clouds. Several scheduling strategies have been proposed to solve this problem for services dealing with deadline‐constrained bag‐of‐tasks workloads. Most of these solutions do not consider the variable performance of the clouds, the provisioning delay of virtual machine instances that affects the elasticity, and the impracticality of having good processing time estimations in real systems. We propose a scheduler algorithm that overcomes previous limitations and can minimize the cost of the infrastructure while maximizing the number of deadlines met by the service. Our solution can work autonomously by using sampled observations of the processing times and considers the heterogeneity and the provisioning time of the virtual machine instances. An evaluation was conducted by simulating different scenarios and workload types. Simulation results show that our solution obtains better or similar results than previous techniques in most scenarios in terms of deadlines met.