Application Placement and Demand Distribution in a Global Elastic Cloud: A Unified Approach

Efficient hosting of applications in a globally distributed multi-tenant cloud computing platform requires policies to decide where to place application replicas and how to distribute client requests among these replicas in response to the dynamic demand. We present a unified method that computes both policies together based on a sequence of min-cost flow models. Further, since optimization problems are generally very large-scale in this environment, we propose a novel demand clustering approach to make them computationally practical. An experimental evaluation, both through large-scale simulation and a prototype in a testbed deployment, shows significant promise of our approach for the targeted environment.