An elastic controller using Colored Petri Nets in cloud computing environment

Cloud computing is an emerging distributed computing paradigm that has become one of the extremely popular computing paradigms nowadays. One of the reasons for the popularity of cloud computing is due to its elasticity feature. Elasticity is a unique feature that enables the cloud platforms to add and remove resources “on the fly” to handle changes in workload demands. On the other hand, if the elasticity feature is not correctly managed, the cloud platforms may face over-provisioning or under-provisioning problems due to the arrival rate of users to the cloud applications varies over the time. Therefore, it necessitates the resource elasticity management issue as one of the challenging problems to be taken into account in the cloud computing environment. In this paper, we propose an elastic controller based on Colored Petri Nets to manage cloud infrastructures automatically. Finally, we evaluate the efficiency of the proposed elastic controller under three real workloads. The simulation results indicate that the proposed elastic controller reduces the response time by up to 4.8%, and increases the resource utilization and the elasticity by up to 9.3% and 6.7% respectively, compared with other approaches.