Bridging Ecology and Cloud: Transposing Ecological Prespective to Enable Better Cloud Autoscaling

Elastic autoscaling is the fundamental mechanism that enables the cloud-based services to continually evolve themselves - through changing the related software configurations and hardware resource provisions - under time-varying workloads. However, given the increasingly complex dynamic, uncertainty and trade-offs related to the runtime QoS and cost/energy of services, cloud autoscaling system is becoming one of the most complex artifacts constructed by human and thus its effectiveness is difficult to be preserved. In this article, we present novel ideas for facilitating cloud autoscaling. Our hypothesis that cloud ecosystem, represented by a collection of cloud-based services, bears many similarities with the natural ecosystem. As such, we in- tend to investigate how ecological view can be adopted to better explain how the cloud-based services evolve, and to explore what are the key factors that drive stable and sustainable cloud-based services in the cloud. To achieve this goal, we aim to transpose ecological principles, theories and models into cloud autoscaling analogues and spontaneously improve long-term stability and sustainability of cloud ecosystem.