Towards Efficient Resource Management in Cloud Computing: A Survey

In the area of cloud computing virtualization has become an indispensable means to enable the efficient utilization of existing compute infrastructure. Selecting the right amount of virtualized resources for an application in such an environment is not an easy task and requires the utilization of three strongly interconnected resource management areas: resource modeling, resource estimation and resource discovery & selection. Most solutions enable an accurate selection of the most appropriate virtual resource package for specific application types already. Support for arbitrary applications, however, is rarely considered which means approaches in this area are usually not applicable for general use cases and, more importantly, difficult to compare with each other. We analyze the most promising existing research in resource management and examine monitored values, supported application classes and the most important criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of the approach. We identify key similarities and differences as well as open research challenges. The discussion about possible solutions includes application classification and the introduction of a general application model to support the selection of the most appropriate resource management approaches for arbitrary applications.