Elastic Application Container: A Lightweight Approach for Cloud Resource Provisioning

Virtual machine (VM) based virtual infrastructure has been adopted widely in cloud computing environment for elastic resource provisioning. Performing resource management using VMs, however, is a heavyweight task. In practice, we have identified two scenarios where VM based resource management is less feasible and less resource-efficient. In this paper, we propose a lightweight resource management model that is called Elastic Application Container (EAC). EAC is a virtual resource unit for delivering better resource efficiency and more scalable cloud applications. We describe the EAC system architecture and components, and also present an algorithm for EAC resource provisioning. We also describe an implementation of the EAC-oriented platform to support multi-tenant cloud use. To evaluate our approach and implementation, we conducted experiments and collected performance data by comparing VM-based and EAC-based resource management with regards to their feasibility and resource-efficiency. The experiment results show that our proposed EAC-based resource management approach outperforms the VM-based approach in terms of feasibility and resource-efficiency.