A benefit-aware on-demand provisioning approach for multi-tier applications in cloud computing

Dynamic resource provisioning is a challenging technique to meet the service level agreement (SLA) requirements of multi-tier applications in virtualization-based cloud computing. Prior efforts have addressed this challenge based on either a cost-oblivious approach or a cost-aware approach. However, both approaches may suffer frequent SLA violations under flash crowd conditions. Because they ignore the benefit gained that a multi-tier application continuously guarantees the SLA in the new configuration. In this paper, we propose a benefit-aware approach with feedback control theory to solve this problem. Experimental results based on live workload traces show that our approach can reduce resource provisioning cost by as much as 30% compared with a costoblivious approach, and can effectively reduce SLA violations compared with a cost-aware approach.