A cost-benefit analysis of using cloud computing to extend the capacity of clusters

In this paper, we investigate the benefits that organisations can reap by using “Cloud Computing” providers to augment the computing capacity of their local infrastructure. We evaluate the cost of seven scheduling strategies used by an organisation that operates a cluster managed by virtual machine technology and seeks to utilise resources from a remote Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider to reduce the response time of its user requests. Requests for virtual machines are submitted to the organisation’s cluster, but additional virtual machines are instantiated in the remote provider and added to the local cluster when there are insufficient resources to serve the users’ requests. Naïve scheduling strategies can have a great impact on the amount paid by the organisation for using the remote resources, potentially increasing the overall cost with the use of IaaS. Therefore, in this work we investigate seven scheduling strategies that consider the use of resources from the “Cloud”, to understand how these strategies achieve a balance between performance and usage cost, and how much they improve the requests’ response times.