A STEP TOWARD SUPPORTING LONG-RUNNING APPLICATIONS WITH REAL-TIME CONSTRAINTS ON HYBRID CLOUDS

The advancement of computer and network technology has brought the world into a new computer cloud era. The ”pay-as-you-go” business model and the service oriented models allow users to have ”unlimited” resources if needed and free from infrastructure maintenance and software upgrades. Cloud services are currently among the top-ranked high growth areas in computing and are seeing an acceleration in enterprise adoption with the worldwide market predicted to reach more than $270b in 2020. According to Google, currently more than 95% of the web services are deployed on cloud.Many di↵erent types of applications are deployed on computer clouds. However, due to inherent performance uncertainty within computer clouds, as of today, applications with real-time and high QoS constraints still operate on traditional computer systems and are not able to benefit from elastic computer clouds.. The thesis focuses on both theoretical analysis and real system implementation on the problem of guaranteeing real-time application’s deadline requirement while minimizing the application’s execution cost on hybrid clouds. Four major problems have been addressed towards moving applications with real-time constraint on hybrid computer clouds. 1). A minimal slack time and minimal distance (MSMD) scheduling algorithm is developed to minimize the resources needed to guarantee an application’s end-to-end deadline requirement using computer clouds. 2). A VM Instance Hour Minimization (IHM) algorithm is developed to reduce the application’s execution cost for given schedules. The proposed IHM algorithm can be integrated with common scheduling algorithm used in the literature. In addition, we also evaluated the feasibility of utilizing spot instance to further reduce the application’s execution cost while not sacrificing QoS guarantees. 3). A reference model for virtual machine launching overhead is developed to predict both system utilization and timing overhead during the VM launching process. 4). A hybrid cloud management tool that integrates the developed algorithms and reference model is developed to support running long-running applications with real-time constraints on hybrid clouds.Ph.D. in Computer Science, May 201