Resource Utilization Analysis of Alibaba Cloud

Currently, low resource utilization and high costs of cloud platform are becoming big challenges to cloud provider. However, due to confidentiality, few cloud platform providers are willing to publish resource utilization data of their cloud platform. This poses great difficulties in designing an effective cloud resource scheduler. Fortunately, Alibaba released its cloud resource usage data in September 2017. This paper analyzes Alibaba cloud trace data deeply from different aspects and reveals some important features of resource utilization. These features will help to design effective resource management approaches for cloud platform: (1) The maximum resource utilization of online services is closely related to their average utilization. (2) The longer a batch instance runs, the longer it may last. (3) The type of job that runs in a container can be estimated according to the amount of consumed resources and life time of this container. (4) Actual resources used by different batch jobs vary with time greatly and static resource allocation would make resource wasted seriously.