v-Bundle: Flexible Group Resource Offerings in Clouds

Traditional Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings provide customers with large numbers of fixed-size virtual machine (VM) instances with resource allocations that are designed to meet application demands. Application demands, however, vary over time. Cloud providers exploit this fact to gain efficiencies through resource consolidation and overcommitment. For cloud customers, however, it leads to inefficient use of the cloud resources that they have purchased. To address cloud customers’ dynamic application requirements, we present a new cloud resource offering, called v-Bundle, which makes flexible exchange of resource capacity among multiple VM instances belonging to the same customer. Specifically, once a customer’s VMs have been instantiated, v-Bundle extended Pastry pub-sub core to manage all of her VMs using anycast tree-based online resource discovery methods. For each customer’s application, we use DHT-based techniques to achieve an initial VM placement that minimizes its use of the datacenter’s network bi-section bandwidth. When VMs’ networking requirements change, the customer can then use v-Bundle to trade the networking resources allocated to her. Experimental evaluations show that the approach can scale well to thousands of hosts and VMs, and v-Bundle can provide customers with better bandwidth utilization and improved application quality of service through borrowing extra bandwidth when needed, at no additional cost in terms of the total resources allocated to the customer.