CLOUDFARM: An Elastic Cloud Platform with Flexible and Adaptive Resource Management

Elasticity is a key feature of current cloud computing platforms. Dependent on their demand tenants can dynamically scale up and down their applications. To increase their revenue, cloud providers are used to over-provision their clusters, but they still have to reserve capacity to avoid that services get unresponsive and cause SLO violation during bursts. In this paper, we propose CLOUDFARM, a PaaS architecture with an adaptive SLO-based resource management mechanism. It introduces new flexible SLAs backed with a respective development model and management interface for end-user services. According to their SLAs and the price tenants pay, services can be selectively downgraded to overcome short-term peaks, e.g. While preparing for scale-out. Providers can deploy services optimistically and thus maximize their data center utilization and revenue.