2019 4th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Internet of Things (CCIOT)

Online Dynamic Resource Procurements via Cloud

Brokerage with Multiple Reserved Instance Terms
Boyu Zhang Ming Fang Hejiao Huang*
School of Artificial Intelligence School of Artificial Intelligence School of Computer Science and
Changchun University of Science and Changchun University of Science and Technology
Technology Technology Harbin Institute of Technology
Changchun 130022 Changchun 130022 ( Shenzhen)
2583392480@qq.com fangming@cust.edu.cn Shenzhen 518055
huanghejiao@hit.edu.cn

Abstract—Different infrastructure resources are utilized by 0.9$ which is lower than the on-demand prices of CSP, i.e.,
the Cloud broker to meet the demands of the users so that the 1$ (step 4). In reality, the broker can earn 1.9$, because he
monetary cost is minimized. To a certain extent, the demands can charge 9.9$ (11*0.9) and only need to pay 8$ (1+4+3).
of the users can be collected or forecasted in advance, and
some off-line algorithms can be used to plan the schemes to use On-demand request Reservation/On-demand
the resources. But it is unavoidable some demands will be
unpredictable and thus the input information will be Price:
User 1 1 On-demand
inaccurate. This blunts greatly the practical effectiveness the 4  =6
User 2 CSP 1
off-line algorithms. It is impracticable to apply the off-line
algorithm with great fluctuation caused by the sudden User 3 Broker
demands. This paper addresses the challenge by an online 1.5 On-demand
User 4 3  =4
algorithm. Extensive real world traces driven evaluations show 5  =8
that the proposed algorithm can save cost up to 14%. t 1 2 3 4 5 6 CSP 2
Exploits proper reservation
Intermediate price: 0.9
Keywords—Cloud Brokerage, Dynamic Resource or on-demand price

Procurements, Online algorithm

I. INTRODUCTION
It is difficult for users to choose one CSP from numerous
public cloud providers (CSPs) and then select appropriate
infrastructures, such as virtual machines (VM) instance, to
meet their demands. Because each CSP deliveries services
with different schemes, VM instances are different, prices
and rental cycle are also different from each other. The
resources can be provided on-demand and be charged at a
short duration of minute (Microsoft Azure [1]) or hour
(Amazon EC2 [2]). As an alternative, VM instances can also
be reserved in advance and be launched in the time of need.
The reserved instance will be billed by a total fee whenever
the instance is active. Amazon gives two choices: 1 year term
and 3 years term (Amazon EC2 [2]). Whenever, VMware
provides a more flexible service from 1 month to 36 months
[3]. Of course the average price is much cheaper than the on-
demand one. The longer the reserved term is, the cheaper the
price. The saving over on-demand price of Amazon
m3.media instance can be up to 29% and 60%, for 1-year
and 3-year terms, respectively [2].
Cloud broker can help users with their professional skills
[4]. Especially it can provide infrastructures to the users by
multiplexing the demands of users and then rent resources
from CSP.
Fig. 1 interprets the instances, prices and services
schemes. In step 1, four users apply for on-demand instances
from time 1 to 6. Then the broker strives to rent instances
from CSP to satisfy all the demands with the least monetary
cost in step 2. CSP can rent the on-demand or the reserved
instances with various terms and prices (step 3). A scheme is
adopted where the left user demand is met by the instance
with the same background setting on the right CSP side. This
enables the broker to serve users with a price of only
*Corresponding author. Tel.: +86 755 26033487
Fig. 1. Broker serve the dynamic requests withe a lower intermediate price
by renting instances from multiple CSPs.
To a certain extent, the demands of the users can be
collected or forecasted in advance, and some off-line
algorithms can be used to plan the schemes to use the
resources. But it is unavoidable some demands will be
unpredictable and thus the statistical result will be inaccurate.
This blunts greatly the practical effectiveness of the off-line
algorithms.
This paper tries to address the change. The main
contributions are as follows:
1. A new online algorithm is presented to solve dynamic
resources provision via brokerage by using reserved
instances.
2. The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated by
using the extensive real world traces driven simulations
through comparing with the existing algorithms.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In
Section 2 related works are reviewed. Section 3 formulates
the problem and presents an online algorithm. It is evaluated
in Section 4 and concluded in Section 5.
II. RELATED WORK
Most works do not provide the reservation scheme to the
broker whenever in one cloud [5] or multi-cloud [6] [7].
Load balancing service broker policy is combined for the
dynamic resource provisioning problem [5]. It only uses the
on-demand VM resources to meet the requirements of the
predicted overall tasks. Energy efficiency is addressed by a
bin packing algorithm in the multi-cloud scenario [6].
Random key Genetic method is used to reduce the monetary
cost when different VMs are rented from multiple clouds [7].
Unfortunately, all of them only make use of the on-demand
resources.

978-1-7281-4398-9/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE 10 Changchun, China•December 6-7, 2019

 The reservation schemes are first taken into account in 0 otherwise
paper [8] and [9]. The authors try to explore the problem by The last demand time at level
bl
using a set of recursive bellman equations. But both of them l , bl  min{t|d tl  1}
assume that the reserved instance term is only one. It is far The last demand time at level
from reality of the cloud industry. el
l , el  max{t|dtl  1}
Multiple reserved instance terms problem is discussed in
paper [10]. The problem is formulated as a 0-1 integer linear Tl The Length of level l , T l  el  bl  1 , For the online
programming first. Then two level by level off-line scenario when d tl  1 ,then at current time
reservation algorithms are provided, i.e., Level by level
longest term preference decision (3LTPD) and Set cover
t ,T l
 el  t  1
Rl
based algorithm (SCBA). At last it is proved that algorithm T The residue length of level l within the coming
3LTPD finds a 2-approximation solution when the demand is accounting period. For the online scenario, then at
convex. It is also proved that SCBA finds a current time, let T Rl  max(T L , T )
H (m) ( m  max l H (u l ) ) approximation for the problem. c0 The on-demand price
The experiment demonstrates that 3LTPD is superior to
SCBA. But unfortunately, no online scenario is addressed. 1
In Fig. 2, there are two levels. T is 5. J is 3. d 2 equals
III. PROBLEM FORMULATION AND ONLINE ALGORITHM 1 because there is a demand at time 2 and level 1. bl is 1, el

A. Problem Formulation and Notations

is 3, Tl is 3, T Rl is 5 in Fig. 2.
At each time t, the demand of different users at this time 2
In Fig. 3, d 4 equals 0 because there is no demand at
will be aggregated together. Fig. 2 and Fig.3 depict the
corresponding demand curve of the demands appeared in Fig. time 4 and level 2.
1.
Suppose t is the current time. alj is the total cost
3 incurred by on-demand instances used in the past period
L3 [t   , t  1] at level l . If the number of launched on-
Demand

2
1 L2
demand instances in [t   , t  1] is n j then alj  n j c0 .
L1
0 1 2 3 4 5 Time(hour) Then the problem can be described as in the coming
accounting period T (corresponding to a year in the
Fig. 2. Demand curve at time 1 and time 2. Bahncard problem) from time 1, the broker wants to
minimize his monetary cost paid to the CSP while meet the
At time 1 and time 2 only the requirements of user B and requirement of all the users.
D are known (Fig. 2). Because there is no new demand at
time 2, the demand curve at time 1 is just the same as that of
B. Online Algorithm
time 2.
The online algorithm utilizes the idea of Bahncard
problem [11]. Bahncard problem formulates the online ticket
3
L3 purchasing on German Federal Railway. A customer can
Demand

2 always buy a ticket every time he wants to travel or buy a

1 L2
Bahncard so that he can travel freely in the next year. He can
L1
0 1 2 3 4 5 Time(hour) make a choice between the ticket and a Bahncard only based
on his historical travel records. This just corresponds to the
one level broker resource provision problem, where the ticket
Fig. 3. Demand curve at time 3. corresponds to an on-demand instance and a Bahncard
corresponds to a reserved instance. The difference is that
At time 3, the requirement of user C is coming, the there are multiple terms for the reserved instance in our
demand curve is changed as Fig. 3. problem, rather than only one term: a year.
The main notations which will be used later are listed in The following online algorithm 1 is proposed.
table I.
Algorithm 1 Online algorithm (Online)
TABLE I. NOTATIONS Algorithm1 Online algorithm (Online)
Notations Descriptions Input: dt : number of required instances arriving at time
T The coming accounting period t .  1 , 2 ,..., J : increasing reserved instance terms with
J The number of reserved instance terms
increasing cost c1 , c2 ,..., cJ
t The current time
Output: A resource provision solution
dt The number of required instances arriving at time t
1: for l  1,..., dt do
l
d Indicator whether there is a demand at level l at billing
alj  0
t
l
2:
cycle t , i.e., d  1 if dt  l
t where is the level, and

11
3: l
if There is an instance reserved to serve dt already information, it is online algorithms. We also select an off-
line algorithm 3LTPD [10] for comparison, in that it saves
l
or dt  0 then almost the same resource cost as SCBA [10] and runs faster.
The following figure depicts the results.
4: break
5: end if
6: Rl
For the instance with term  j ( j  T ) , calculate

Saving percentage（%）
W/BLP
30% 3LT PD
alj , j  1, 2,..., J . Online
20%
Obviously, al1  al 2  ...  alJ
10%

7: if Exists j , such that alj  c j then 0

A B C D
8: i  max{ j | alj  c j } , reserve an instance with Data source

term  i at level l Fig. 4. Saving percentage with CSP 1 resources.

9: else Fig. 4 compares the three algorithms when only the terms
10: launch an on-demand instance at level l of CSP 1 is used. Obviously the online algorithm 3LTPD is
11: end if the best because it know all the demand in advance. When
12: end for the demand is coming one by one, the online algorithm is
much better than N/B OnD and W/B LP.
Note at time t , dt is the number of required instances W/BLP

Saving percentage（%）
3LT PD
arriving at time t , so dt indicates the maximum level. The 30% Online
algorithm will find an appropriate instance for each level
20%
(Line 1 to Line 12). First, alj is assigned as 0 (Line 2). Then
if the demand has been satisfied (because maybe the term of 10%
a selected reserved instance is longer than the known
demands at this level), or there is no demand at this 0
l A B C D
time ( dt  0) , the next level will be checked (Line 3 to Data source

Line 4). The algorithm only considers the terms that are not Fig. 5. Saving percentage with CSP 2 resources.
longer than the residue accounting period. At the same time,
Saving percentage（%）

W/BLP
the on-demand instance cost of past resource provision is 3LTPD
calculated since it can indicate the regular pattern of the Online

future demands (Line 6). Based on the comparison of the

past on-demand instance cost and the reserved instance cost,
the longest term that is economical is chosen to reserve (Line
8). Otherwise, the on-demand instance is used (Line 10).

IV. EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION
We use Parallel Workloads Archive [12] to evaluate the
effectiveness of the online algorithm. A, B, C and D are used
to indicate the four data sources, respectively. The prices and
terms of CSPs are also the same as that in paper [10].
The simulation environment is set up in a Java platform.
The platform is running on a PC (Lenovo Think Centre
M4350t-N020, Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3470 CPU @ 3.20GHz,
8G RAM).
Two other schemes are used to evaluate the effectiveness
of the proposed algorithm. One is 3LTPD [10]. Another one
is an instinctive heuristic. Each time the broker will select the
longest reserved instance term to meet the aggregated
Data source
Fig. 6. Saving percentage with more reserved instance terms.
Fig. 5 supposes only the terms of CSP 2 are used and Fig.
6 supposes that all the terms of CSP 1 and CSP 2 are vailable.
Both of the two figures illustrate the same phenomenon as
that of Fig. 4. It is due to that the proposed online algorithm
utilizes the historical resource provision information to
facilitate the decision about which kind of instance should be
selected. So a more economical reservation policy is adopted.
on average, 8.58%, 13.86% and 14.42% resource cost are
saved when the terms of CSP 1, CSP 2 as well as both of
them are used, respectively.
Saving percentage（%）

CSP1
demand. It lies in that the longest instance is the cheapest. It 20% CSP2
is named as the longest preference scheme (abbreviated as CSP1&CSP2
W/B LP).
10%
To calculate the saving percentage, it is supposed that all
demand is served by on-demand instances (abbreviated as
N/B OnD). The cost of N/B OnD is used as the baseline. 0
A B C D
Data source
Herein demand dt arrives at time t and there is no future
information about dt+1. Because N/B OnD uses the current Fig. 7. Saving percentage comparison.

12
 Generally, in Fig. 7, note that the saving percentages on
data B and D are smaller than that on data A and C. This is
because that data C and D are more fluctuant [10]. The
request fluctuation impairs the forecast based on historical
information, and hence the accuracy of the decision.
Fig. 7 also reveals that more cost can be saved when
more candidate reserved instance terms are available. i.e.,
when both of the terms of CSP 1 and CSP 2 are available,
most cost can be reduced because more suitable instances
terms can be reserved.
V. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
Considering the multiple reserved instance terms, An
online algorithm is presented to address the dynamic
resource procurement problem for a broker. It is
demonstrated that it can save a great monetary cost for the
broker by only considering the historical resource provision
records.
Our future work aims to exploit resources considering the
virtual migration cost, including time payload and stability.
Two factors should be taken into account. One is the policy
about how to deliver better services to enterprise users.
Comparing to small users, demand modes of large enterprise
users are more stable and scalable. Though we can still use
the aforementioned schemes, a specific one which considers
the demand pattern so that it is with lower price, provides
more flexible usage pattern and guarantees high availability
is an attractive direction. Another is to explore how to unify
the demand uncertainty with the algorithm.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work is financially supported by National Key R&D
Program of China under Grant No. 2017YFB0803002,
Science and Technology Development Plan Program of Jilin
Province (20170307002GX), National Natural Science
13
Foundation of China under Grant No. 61672195 and No.
61732022.
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