Brownout Approach for Adaptive Management of Resources and Applications in Cloud Computing Systems

Abstract

Cloud computing has been regarded as an emerging approach to provisioning resources and managing applications. It provides attractive features, such as an on-demand model, scalability enhancement, and management cost reduction. However, cloud computing systems continue to face problems such as hardware failures, overloads caused by unexpected workloads, or the waste of energy due to inefficient resource utilization, which all result in resource shortages and application issues such as delays or saturation. A paradigm, the brownout, has been applied to handle these issues by adaptively activating or deactivating optional parts of applications or services to manage resource usage in cloud computing system. Brownout has successfully shown that it can avoid overloads due to changes in workload and achieve better load balancing and energy saving effects. This article proposes a taxonomy of the brownout approach for managing resources and applications adaptively in cloud computing systems and carries out a comprehensive survey. It identifies open challenges and offers future research directions.