Enabling Cloud Applications to Negotiate Multiple Resources in a Cost-Efficient Manner

Cloud applications can achieve similar performance with diverse multi-resource configurations, allowing cloud service providers to benefit from optimal resource allocation for reducing their operation cost. This paper aims to solve the problem of multi-resource negotiation with considerations of both the service-level agreement (SLA) and the cost efficiency so that the performance requirement for cloud services is satisfied and the cost of resource usage is also minimized. The performance and resource demand are usually application-dependent, making the optimization problem complicated, especially when the dimension of multi-resource configurations is large. To this end, we use reinforcement learning to solve the optimal problem of multi-resource configuration with simultaneous optimization of the learning efficiency and performance guarantee. The developed prototype named SmartYARN is an extended Apache YARN equipped with our learning algorithm which can enable cloud applications to negotiate multiple resources cost-effectively. The extensive evaluations with four typical benchmarks show that SmartYARN performs well in reducing the cost of resource usage while maintaining compliance with the SLA constraints of cloud service simultaneously.