ERP: An elastic resource provisioning approach for cloud applications

Elasticity is the key technique to provisioning resources dynamically in order to flexibly meet the users' demand. Namely, the elasticity is aimed at meeting the demand at any time. However, the aforementioned approaches usually provision virtual machines (VMs) in a coarse-grained manner just by the CPU utilization. Actually, two or more elements are needed for the performance metric, including the CPU and the memory. It is challenging to determine a suitable threshold to efficiently scale the resources up or down. In this paper we present an elastic scaling framework that is implemented by the cloud layer model. First we propose the elastic resource provisioning (ERP) approach on the performance threshold. The proposed threshold is based on the Grey relational analysis (GRA) policy, including the CPU and the memory. Secondly, according to the fixed threshold, we scale up the resources from different granularities, such as in the physical machine level (PM-level) or virtual machine level (VM-level). In contrast, we scale down the resources and shut down the spare machines. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in real workloads. The extensive experiments show that the ERP algorithm performs the elastic strategy efficiently by reducing the overhead and response time.