Elastic Application Container: A Lightweight Approach for Cloud Resource Provisioning

TLDR

Virtual machine–based infrastructure is widely used for elastic resource provisioning, but managing resources with VMs is a heavyweight task. The authors propose a lightweight resource management model called Elastic Application Container (EAC). EAC comprises a system architecture with defined components, an algorithm for resource provisioning, and an implementation platform that supports multi‑tenant cloud use, which the authors evaluated through experiments comparing VM‑based and EAC‑based management. The study found that EAC serves as a virtual resource unit that improves resource efficiency and scalability, and experimental results demonstrate that EAC‑based management outperforms VM‑based management in feasibility and resource‑efficiency.

Abstract

Virtual machine (VM) based virtual infrastructure has been adopted widely in cloud computing environment for elastic resource provisioning. Performing resource management using VMs, however, is a heavyweight task. In practice, we have identified two scenarios where VM based resource management is less feasible and less resource-efficient. In this paper, we propose a lightweight resource management model that is called Elastic Application Container (EAC). EAC is a virtual resource unit for delivering better resource efficiency and more scalable cloud applications. We describe the EAC system architecture and components, and also present an algorithm for EAC resource provisioning. We also describe an implementation of the EAC-oriented platform to support multi-tenant cloud use. To evaluate our approach and implementation, we conducted experiments and collected performance data by comparing VM-based and EAC-based resource management with regards to their feasibility and resource-efficiency. The experiment results show that our proposed EAC-based resource management approach outperforms the VM-based approach in terms of feasibility and resource-efficiency.