Optimal Hiring of Cloud Servers

McGough, A.S.; Mitrani, I.

Abstract

A host uses servers hired from a Cloud in order to offer certain services to paying customers. It must decide dynamically when and how many servers to hire, and when to release them, so as to minimize both the job holding costs and the server costs. Under certain assumptions, the problem can be formulated in terms of a semi-Markov decision process and the optimal hiring policy can be computed. Two situations are considered: (a) jobs are submitted in random batches and servers can be hired for arbitrary periods of time; (b) jobs arrive singly and servers must be hired for fixed periods of time. In both cases, the optimal policies are compared with some simple and easily implementable heuristics.

Citation

McGough, A., & Mitrani, I. (2014). Optimal Hiring of Cloud Servers. In A. Horváth, & K. Wolter (Eds.), Computer performance engineering : 11th European Workshop, EPEW 2014, Florence, Italy, September 11-12, 2014. Proceedings (1-15). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10885-8_1

• Publication Date: Sep 1, 2014
• Deposit Date: Jan 11, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 28, 2015
• Publisher: Springer Verlag
• Pages: 1-15
• Series Title: Lecture notes in computer science
• Book Title: Computer performance engineering : 11th European Workshop, EPEW 2014, Florence, Italy, September 11-12, 2014. Proceedings.
• ISBN: 9783319108841
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10885-8_1
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1676667