Resource allocation and dynamic provisioning for Service-Oriented applications in cloud environment

Cloud computing has caused a revolution in our way of using software. Software development and deployment based on the new models of Software as a Service (SaaS) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) are expected to bring a lot of benefits for users. However, software developers and software service providers will have to address new challenging issues before such benefits can be realized. The issues mainly arise from two characteristics of service-based applications: software based on distributed service flows and online concurrent user access. This paper deals with one of the important issues concerning resource allocation and dynamic provisioning for the deployed services in a cloud environment. We propose a service deployment strategy based on the structural property of application service flows and a dynamic resource provisioning mechanism utilizing the estimation of future service requests. A series of experiments were conducted on the CloudSim platform to evaluate the proposed mechanisms. The experimental results indicate that the proposed methods significantly outperform the commonly used primitive approaches, achieving up to 79.9% performance improvement.