A Reliable Embedding Framework for Elastic Virtualized Services in the Cloud

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel framework for managing the resource provisioning of reliable virtual networks (VN) in the cloud. This includes handling the placement of VN requests while providing availability guarantees, as well as reconfiguring/adapting their placement as their request changes over time. This is particularly interesting for services with periodic resource demands. Given the heterogeneous failure rates of physical network components, the placement and reconfiguration must ensure that the selected hosts for each VN meets its availability requirements. The existing work on availability-aware VN placement has overlooked the case of “availability over-provisioning,” as well as the fact that VN requests are subject to change over time. To this extent, we propose a novel framework that consists of two main modules; JENA: a tabu-based availability-aware resource allocation (embedding) module for VNs that achieves “just-enough” availability guarantees, and ARES: a reliable reconfiguration module to adapt the embedding of hosted services as they scale. Further, we introduce the concept of “protection-domains” and “protection-policies” to equip our proposed modules with the ability to augment services with redundant/backup nodes to enhance their reliability. Our numerical results show that our framework enhances network’s admissibility (with 33% lower blocking compared to existing work), and in return increases the cloud provider’s long term revenue, compared to peer and benchmark algorithms.