A cognitive/intelligent resource provisioning for cloud computing services: opportunities and challenges

In cloud computing, resources could be provisioned in a dynamic way on demand for cloud services. Cloud providers seek to realize effective SLA execution mechanisms for avoiding SLA violations by provisioning the resources or applications and timely interacting to environmental changes and failures. Sufficient resource provisioning to cloud’s services relies on the requirements of the workloads to achieve a high performance for quality of service. Therefore, deciding the suitable amount of cloud’s resources for these services to achieve is one of the main works in cloud computing. During the runtime of services, the amount of cloud’s resources can be specified and provisioned based on the actual workloads changes. Determining the correct amount of cloud’s resources needed for running the services on clouds is not easy task, and it depends on the existing workloads of services. Consequently, it is required to predict the future workloads for dynamic provisioning of resources in order to meet the changes in workloads and demands of services in cloud computing environments. In this paper, we study the possibility of using a cognitive/intelligent approach for cloud resource provisioning which is a combination of the autonomic computing concept, deep learning technique and fuzzy logic control. Deep learning technique is a state-of-the-art in the machine learning field. It achieved promising results in many other fields like image classification and speech recognition. For these reasons, deep learning is proposed in this work to tackle the workload prediction in cloud computing. Additionally, we also propose to use a fuzzy logic-based method in order to make a decision in the case of uncertainty of the workload prediction. We study various exiting works on autonomic cloud resource provisioning and show that there is still an opportunity to improve the current methods. We also present the challenges that may exist on this domain.