Efficient Resource Management for Cloud Computing Environments

Cloud computing has recently gained popularity as a cost-effective model for hosting and delivering services over the Internet. In a cloud computing environment, a cloud provider packages its physical resources in data centers into virtual resources and offers them to service providers using a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Meanwhile, a service provider uses the rented virtual resources to host its services. This large-scale multi-tenant architecture of cloud computing systems raises key challenges regarding how data centers resources should be controlled and managed by both service and cloud providers. This thesis addresses several key challenges pertaining to resource management in cloud environments. From the perspective of service providers, we address the problem of selecting appropriate data centers for service hosting with consideration of resource price, service quality as well as dynamic reconfiguration costs. From the perspective of cloud providers, as it has been reported that workload in real data centers can be typically divided into server-based applications and MapReduce applications with different performance and scheduling criteria, we provide separate resource management solutions for each type of workloads. For server-based applications, we provide a dynamic capacity provisioning scheme that dynamically adjusts the number of active servers to achieve the best trade-off between energy savings and scheduling delay, while considering heterogeneous resource characteristics of both workload and physical machines. For MapReduce applications, we first analyzed task run-time resource consumption of a large variety of MapReduce jobs and discovered it can vary significantly over-time, depending on the phase the task is currently executing. We then present a novel scheduling algorithm that controls task execution at the level of phases with the aim of improving both job running time and resource utilization. Through detailed simulations and experiments using real cloud clusters, we have found our proposed solutions achieve substantial gain compared to current state-of-art resource management solutions, and therefore have strong implications in the design of real cloud resource management systems in practice