FineCloud: Fine-grained Cloud Service Advisory using Machine Learning

Motivated by real customer problems, we investigated utilization of cloud services at different layers including infrastructure (IaaS), application services (PaaS) and databases (DaaS). We found several issues such as forgetting about unused resources, bursty workloads and service dependencies causing under-utilization (a.k.a. over- provisioning) problem. Cloud advisory tools offered by the public providers either lack the fine-grained analysis needed for actionable recommendations or can’t see the correlations among services that are used by the same customers’ resource groups. We proposed an automated, near real-time advisor that utilizes historical usage data and machine learning (ML) models to recommend cost saving opportunities. We demonstrated significant cost savings averaging around 20%, which can accumulate as thousands of Dollars for large and active systems. Since our advisory models depend on time-series data, we compared several forecasting algorithms including ARIMA, LSTM and Prophet. We found LSTM model to deliver the most accurate results for our workloads.