Resource Provisioning for Enriched Services in Cloud Environment

Cloud services are based on the provisioning of computing, storage, and networking resources in order to satisfy requests generated by remote end-users. High speed Internet access and multi-core Virtual Machines (VMs) enable today the provisioning of diversified and enriched types of services in Cloud environment. In this paper, we consider several types of basic services and show how their orchestration may lead to the provisioning of more sophisticated services. For this purpose, we define four types of requests that cover the wide spectrum of possible services. We then formulate the resource provisioning problem as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP). We assume that the underlying infrastructure is based on a set of end-to-end connections with guaranteed sustainable bandwidth such as Carrier-Grade Ethernet (CGE) circuits. We investigate the impact of two innovative services on resource allocation carried out by a Cloud Service Provider (CSP). These services correspond to distributed data storage and to multicast data transfer. For the former service, we consider the possibility of splitting a storage request onto different remote storage nodes. The latter service aims to distribute a same data sequence from one server towards multiple remote nodes assuming a limited number of network nodes have multicast capacities. These two innovative services provide a gain of 7% in terms of accepted requests when applied to the 18-node NSFnet backbone network.