Elastic and efficient virtual network provisioning for cloud-based multi-tier applications

The multi-tier architecture is prevalently adopted by cloud applications, such as the three-tier web application. It is highly desirable for both tenants and providers to provide virtual networks in an efficient and elastic way, where tenant applications can automatically scale in or out with varying workloads and providers can accommodate as many requests as possible in the underlying network. However, due to potential conflicts between efficiency and elasticity, it is challenging to achieve these two goals simultaneously in abstracting tenant requirements and designing corresponding provisioning algorithms. In this paper, we propose an efficient and elastic virtual network provisioning solution called Easy Alloc, which is comprised of an elasticity-aware abstraction model and a virtual network provisioning algorithm. To accurately capture the tenant requirement and maintain the provisioning simplicity for providers, the elasticity-aware model enables two types of decoupling, i.e., Always-on VMs for normal load and on-demand VMs for dynamic scaling, and the bandwidth requirement of each VM for intra- and inter-tier communications. Then we formulate the virtual network provisioning as an overhead minimization problem, where the objective simultaneously considers the bandwidth and elasticity overhead. Due to the NP-completeness of this problem, we leverage two heuristics, slot reservation and tier iteration, to obtain an efficient algorithm. Extensive simulation results show that compared with a typical elasticity-agnostic method under a heavy load, Easy Alloc enables a 9% increase of request acceptance rate and a 16.8% improvement of the successful extension rate. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work targeting at the elastic virtual network provisioning.