Resource provisioning using workload clustering in cloud computing environment: a hybrid approach

In recent years, cloud computing paradigm has emerged as an internet-based technology to realize the utility model of computing for serving compute-intensive applications. In the cloud computing paradigm, the IT and business resources, such as servers, storage, network, and applications, can be dynamically provisioned to cloud workloads submitted by end-users. Since the cloud workloads submitted to cloud providers are heterogeneous in terms of quality attributes, management and analysis of cloud workloads to satisfy Quality of Service (QoS) requirements can play an important role in cloud resource management. Therefore, it is necessary for the provisioning of proper resources to cloud workloads using clustering of them according to QoS metrics. In this paper, we present a hybrid solution to handle the resource provisioning issue using workload analysis in a cloud environment. Our solution utilized the Imperialist Competition Algorithm (ICA) and K-means for clustering the workload submitted by end-users. Also, we use a decision tree algorithm to determine scaling decisions for efficient resource provisioning. The effectiveness of the proposed approach under two real workloads traces is evaluated. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed solution reduces the total cost by up to 6.2%, and the response time by up to 6.4%, and increases the CPU utilization by up to 13.7%, and the elasticity by up to 30.8% compared with the other approaches.