A Debt-Aware Learning Approach for Resource Adaptations in Cloud Elasticity Management

Elasticity is a cloud property that enables applications and their execution systems to dynamically acquire and release shared computational resources on demand. Moreover, it unfolds the advantage of economies of scale in the cloud through a drop in the average costs of these shared resources. However, it is still an open challenge to achieve a perfect match between resource demand and provision in autonomous elasticity management. Resource adaptation decisions essentially involve a trade-off between economics and performance, which produces a gap between the ideal and actual resource provisioning. This gap, if not properly managed, can negatively impact the aggregate utility of a cloud customer in the long run. To address this limitation, we propose a technical debt-aware learning approach for autonomous elasticity management based on a reinforcement learning of debts in resource provisioning; the adaptation pursues strategic decisions that values the potential utility produced by the gaps between resource supply and demand. We extend CloudSim and Burlap to evaluate our approach. The evaluation indicates that a debt-aware elasticity management obtains a higher utility for a cloud customer, while conforming expected levels of performance.