Journal of Network and System Management manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Resource Management in Clouds: Survey and Research Challenges

Abstract Resource management in a cloud environment is a hard problem, due to: the scale of modern data centers; the heterogeneity of resource types and their inter-dependencies; the variability and unpredictability of the load; as well as the range of objectives of the different actors in a cloud ecosystem. Consequently, both academia and industry began significant research efforts in this area. In this paper, we survey the recent literature, covering 250+ publications, and highlighting key results. We out-line a conceptual framework for cloud resource management and use it to structure the state-of-the-art review. Based on our analysis, we identify five challenges for fu-ture investigation. These relate to: providing predictable performance for cloud-hosted applications; achieving global manageability for cloud systems; engineering scalable re-source management systems; understanding economic behavior and cloud pricing; and developing solutions for the mobile cloud paradigm