Moving Big Data to The Cloud: An Online Cost-Minimizing Approach

Cloud computing, rapidly emerging as a new computation paradigm, provides agile and scalable resource access in a utility-like fashion, especially for the processing of big data. An important open issue here is to efficiently move the data, from different geographical locations over time, into a cloud for effective processing. The de facto approach of hard drive shipping is not flexible or secure. This work studies timely, cost-minimizing upload of massive, dynamically-generated, geo-dispersed data into the cloud, for processing using a MapReduce-like framework. Targeting at a cloud encompassing disparate data centers, we model a cost-minimizing data migration problem, and propose two online algorithms: an online lazy migration (OLM) algorithm and a randomized fixed horizon control (RFHC) algorithm , for optimizing at any given time the choice of the data center for data aggregation and processing, as well as the routes for transmitting data there. Careful comparisons among these online and offline algorithms in realistic settings are conducted through extensive experiments, which demonstrate close-to-offline-optimum performance of the online algorithms.