Group Instance: Flexible Co-Location Resistant Virtual Machine Placement in IaaS Clouds

This paper proposes and analyzes a new virtual machine (VM) placement technique called Group Instance to deal with co-location attacks in public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. Specifically, Group Instance organizes cloud users into groups with pre-determined sizes set by the cloud provider. Our empirical results obtained via experiments with real-world data sets containing million of VM requests have demonstrated the effectiveness of the new technique. In particular, the advantages of Group Instance are three-fold: 1) it is simple and highly configurable to suit the financial and security needs of cloud providers, 2) it produces better or at least similar performance compared to more complicated, state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of resource utilization and co-location security, and 3) it does not require any modifications to the underlying infrastructures of existing public cloud services.