DEGREE PROJECT IN TECHNOLOGY,

FIRST CYCLE, 15 CREDITS

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN 2021

Predicting a business application's

cloud server CPU utilization using
the machine learning model LSTM

FILIP NÄÄS STARBERG

AXEL ROOTH

KTH ROYAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

SCHOOL OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE

P REDICTING A BUSINESS APPLICATION ’ S CLOUD
SERVER CPU UTILIZATION USING THE MACHINE
LEARNING MODEL LSTM
F. Nääs Starberg, and A. Rooth, Students, KTH
Abstract—Cloud Computing sees increased adoption as com-
panies seek to increase flexibility and reduce cost. Although the
large cloud service providers employ a pay-as-you-go pricing
model and enable customers to scale up and down quickly, there
is still room for improvement. Workload in the form of CPU
utilization often fluctuates which leads to unnecessary cost and
environmental impact for companies. To help mitigate this issue,
the aim of this paper is to predict future CPU utilization using
a long short-term memory (LSTM) machine learning model. By
predicting utilization up to 30 minutes into the future, companies
are able to scale their capacity just in time and avoid unnecessary
cost and damage to the environment. The study is divided into
two parts. The first part analyses how well the LSTM model
performs when predicting one step at a time compared with a
state-of-the-art model. The second part analyses the accuracy
of the LSTM when making predictions up to 30 minutes into
the future. To allow for an objective analysis of results, the
LSTM is compared with a standard RNN, which is similar to
the LSTM in its inherit algorithmic structure. To conclude, the
results suggest that LSTM may be a useful tool for reducing cost
and unnecessary environmental impact for business applications
hosted on a public cloud.
Sammanfattning—Användandet av molntjänster ökar bland
företag som önskar förbättrad flexibilitet och sänkta kostna-
der. De stora molntjänstleverantörerna använder en prismodell
där kostnaden är direkt kopplad till användningen, och låter
kunderna snabbt ställa om sin kapacitet, men det finns ändå
förbättringsmöjligheter. CPU-behoven fluktuerar ofta vilket leder
till meningslösa kostnader och onödig påverkan på klimatet när
kapacitet är outnyttjad. För att lindra detta problem används i
denna rapport en LSTM maskininlärningsmodell för att förutspå
framtida CPU-utnyttjande. Genom att förutspå utnyttjandet
upp till 30 minuter in i framtiden hinner företag ställa om
sin kapacitet och undvika onödig kostnad och klimatpåverkan.
Arbetet är uppdelat i två delar. Först en del där LSTM-modellen
förutspår ett tidssteg åt gången. Därefter en del som analyserar
träffsäkerheten för LSTM flera tidssteg in i framtiden, upp
till 30 tidssteg. För att möjliggöra en objektiv utvärdering så
jämfördes LSTM-modellen med ett standard recurrent neural
network (RNN) vilken liknar LSTM i sin struktur. Resultaten
i denna studie visar att LSTM verkar vara överlägsen RNN,
både när det gäller att förutspå ett tidssteg in i framtiden och
när det gäller flera tidssteg in i framtiden. LSTM-modellen
var kapabel att förutspå CPU-utnyttjandet 30 minuter in i
framtiden med i hög grad bibehållen träffsäkerhet, vilket också
var målet med studien. Sammanfattningsvis tyder resultaten på
att denna LSTM-modell, och möjligen liknande LSTM-modeller,
har potential att användas i samband med företagsapplikationer
då man önskar att reducera onödig kostnad och klimatpåverkan.
Index Terms—Cloud computing; CPU prediction; Infrastruc-
ture as a service; LSTM; Machine learning; Neural networks;
Recurrent neural networks; Time series prediction;
1
I. I NTRODUCTION
T HE adoption of cloud computing (CC) for enterprise
applications is growing at a fast pace and it is expected
to grow even more the coming years [1]. Some of the
advantages of CC are easy implementation, allowing focus on
companies’ core competencies, facilitating quick adaption to
current computational needs, and in many cases reduced cost.
Even though there are different pricing models, a fundamen-
tal concept within CC is usage based pricing, often referred to
as ”pay-as-you-go”. Comparing usage based pricing to owning
private servers which must accommodate maximum load at all
times, it is easy to grasp how CC can reduce cost in theory.
However, with an expected cloud growth usage of 47
percent, 30 percent of cloud spend is wasted and 23 percent
of cloud usage is over budget [2]. At the same time, data
centers’ energy consumption in 2018 corresponded to 1% of
global energy consumption [3]. Thus making the argument for
the existence of cloud inefficiencies that need to be addressed
by company executives in order for companies adapt in a cloud
based sustainable future.
The company Afry, which this research is done in collab-
oration with, seeks to improve upon these environmental and
budgetary issues for themselves. The company has experienced
a quick and large-scale adoption of CC and now seeks to get
a better understanding of its usage and spending. To achieve
this, Afry is looking for new analytical tools.
Computational power is often overprovisioned to sustain
workload during peak hours [4] which generates the idle
capacity outside peak hours. By optimizing the computational
capacity occupied, and avoiding underutilization, it would
be possible for a company to reduce both its cost and its
ecological footprint.
One way to enhance companies’ capabilities of making the
necessary decisions in this area is to reduce the uncertainty
about what CPU capacity will be required in the near future.
In turn, this means that the company must be able to reliably
make accurate predictions about load surges and ebbs. In this
paper, focus will be on CPU utilization in databases hosting
internal company applications used by employees at Afry.
Previous research of predicting CPU utilization in the cloud
has shown that standard recurrent neural networks (RNN)
are able to make accurate predictions up to 15 minutes into
the future [5]. However, there is demand for predictions
up to as much as 30 minutes into the future; this would
allow enough time to adjust CPU capacity preemptively. An
2
advanced version of a recurrent neural network is a model
called long short-term memory (LSTM) which will be the
basis of this research. The LSTM model has been proven to
be state-of-the-art for time series predictions with its ability
to adapt continuously combined with the ability to remember
and differentiate between long and short term patterns.
Therefore, the aim of this paper is to understand how an
LSTM performs compared with a standard recurrent neural
network, and to also assess how far into the future an LSTM
can predict. If the LSTM can make reliable predictions 30
minutes into the future it could become a helpful tool for
companies hoping to optimize their CC usage in order to
reduce their spending and their ecological footprint.
A. Research questions
The research questions posed by this paper are the follow-
ing:
1) Does a univariate LSTM produce more accurate single-
step forecasts compared to a standard RNN?
2) What accuracy does a multistep LSTM retain when
predicting 30 minutes into the future?
B. Paper disposition
The paper’s disposition is the following. First, Section
II aims to define, and give the reader better understanding
of, cloud computing and its use in corporate environments.
Section III describes related work regarding forecasting within
cloud computing. Section IV continues with an explanation
of necessary theory regarding machine learning and neural
networks. In Section V the methodology used in this paper
is explained. The findings of this paper are presented in
Section VI and followed up in section VII with a discussion
concerning these findings. Lastly, Section VIII summarizes the
conclusions and Section IX provides ideas for future work.
II. BACKGROUND AND O BJECTIVES
This section first aims to give the reader necessary back-
ground regarding cloud computing and then to discuss what
adopting CC means for companies in practice and what interest
companies might have in this research.
A. Definition of cloud computing
Cloud computing is a collective name for the delivery of
different types of computing services across the internet [6].
A commonly used definition for Cloud Computing is the NIST
definition [7]:
Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, con-
venient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of config-
urable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage,
applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and
released with minimal management effort or service provider
interaction.
B. Cloud computing market
Firstly, there is what is called private clouds. A private
cloud’s resources are exclusively used by the company or orga-
nization which either hosts it for themselves or pays a service
provider to host it. Secondly, there is public clouds. A public
cloud is owned and hosted by a third-party company known as
a cloud service provider (CSP) which owns and manages all
connected hardware, software and support infrastructure [6].
The CSPs are what constitutes the cloud computing market
available to everyone.
The largest CSPs to date are Amazon Web Services (AWS)
with 32%, Microsoft Azure with 19% and Google Cloud with
7% [8] market shares. The paper will be limited to these
companies since they realize advantages only available at their
economies of scale [4] and thus are able to fulfil what is
required by the NIST definition.
For the purposes of this paper, the term cloud computing
can be distilled further. There are three main categories within
cloud computing and the categories provide different levels of
service and control respectively.
The highest level of service is Software as a Service (SaaS)
which is a final product provided by the CSP. Examples
of SaaS are Microsoft Outlook, Google Gmail or any other
application that the user connects to via internet. The CSP
manages all the underlying software and infrastructure [6].
The intermediate level is Platform as a Service (PaaS). It
provides an environment for software developers to develop,
test, deliver and manage applications without worrying about
the infrastructure [6].
Finally there is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) which
offers access to physical or virtual computers (several virtual
computers can be hosted on the same physical machine) and
data storage.
To keep the explanation simple only one CSP is used as
an example since there might be smaller, but not important
to this paper, differences between CSPs. For the most part,
AWS’s implementation of IaaS is used as an example since
they are the largest cloud service provider.
The major CSPs provide the option to reserve an instance
over a time period in which case the customer pays for the
reserved capacity regardless of usage but at a discounted price.
If the customer knows it will no longer need all of its reserved
capacity it can sell the abundant capacity in a marketplace
provided by AWS. However, the sell price is usually lower
than what was paid for that capacity [9]. Microsoft Azure
does not provide a marketplace but customers can terminate
reserved instances to get a refund but there is a termination
fee of 12 percent. In a perfect market there should be no price
difference which would allow selling abundant capacity at will
and purchasing more capacity when required. A perfect market
would thus make it easy to match capacity with demand but
the market is currently far from perfect. This is evident by the
fact that the two largest CSPs together maintain an over 50%
market share.
C. Cloud computing pricing
With AWS’s on-demand instances the customer pays for
every second (minimum 60 seconds) or hour (machines that

do not run Linux get charged by the hour) of usage, this
is what is known as pay-as-you-go. Depending on hardware
configuration there is a differing price for the usage amount,
meaning that it is in the customer’s interest to match the
hardware capacity with the requirements to avoid paying
unnecessary costs.
With on-demand instances it is possible to scale capacity
up or down and therefore it is possible to match capacity
with fluctuating capacity requirements. The problem is that the
adjustments are not guaranteed to be committed instantly; in
the case of Microsoft Azure scaling can take up to 30 minutes.
To save cost it would be beneficial for the customer to reliably
know – up to 30 minutes in advance – whether they should
scale up, scale down or keep the current level.
There is a specific reason for why this, and previous,
research focuses on the CPU utilization part of CC. Here, the
reason for choosing to analyze CPU – and not the other parts
that together with CPU constitute cloud computing, such as
bandwidth and memory – will be elaborated upon.
Pricing for both memory and bandwidth (data transfer)
relies on bytes used. Although there are different underlying
hardware optimized for different types of applications with
varying pricing, storage pricing for both AWS and Azure is
directly related to how many gigabytes are used on average per
month [9] [10]. Storage can of course fluctuate over time, and
thus affect price per month, but it is usually not as volatile as
CPU usage. The cost of bandwidth is also calculated based on
bytes used each month and AWS offers a discount for larger
volumes [11] [10]. To save money on bandwidth it would
likely be best for the customer to look at ways to reduce data
transfer.
When it comes to CPU the issues are more complex. As
mentioned, it is common for CSPs to use pay-as-you-go
pricing. The customer is billed based on the amount of time the
CPU was used in some way; it could be CPU cycles, seconds
or hours. This may be interpreted as customers being charged
the minimal amount for their computing needs but that notion
is somewhat misleading.
AWS and Google Cloud calls it vCPU and Azure calls it
vCore. The ”v” stands for virtual since customers do not have
to worry about how the hardware infrastructure is implemented
by the CSP. One vCore (or vCPU) essentially corresponds to
a core on a physical CPU [12]. Consequently, more vCores
roughly translates to more computing power.
The final cost that the customer gets billed is based in part
on how much CPU time was consumed and in part on how
many vCores were used during that time. This applies to all
of AWS, Azure and Google Cloud [10] [13] [14]. In addition,
the price varies depending on which generation of CPU the
cores are a part of [15] but this will not affect this paper’s
research.
This paper will focus on how companies can save money
by scaling the number of vCores used to improve utilization.
Part of the reason to use vCores is to allow scaling so this
feature should be taken advantage of [10].
3
D. Companies and cloud computing
More and more companies are switching over to public CC
from private clouds and other types of on-premise computing
[1]. There are many aspects associated with this change in
how the companies operate.
First of all, cloud computing allows companies to focus on
improving customer experience, increase productivity, lower
cost and – by enabling quicker time to market – also helps in
generating revenue.
Second of all, CC is helping companies during the digiti-
zation trends where the users demand access to systems from
anywhere and at any time. Also, the ability of CC to rapidly
scale is well suited for companies building APIs since the APIs
might handle huge amounts of information which increases the
chances of unpredictable load.
Third and last, when switching to CC, a company can
be seen as moving away from CapEx (capital expenditure)
to OpEx (operatinonal expenditure). Instead of paying for
hardware, software and implementation the costs are ongoing.
This can be misinterpreted as reducing investment in IT while
the costs of operating are increasing [1]. To avoid confusion
the transition must be communicated clearly and might require
new ways of analyzing IT.
E. Cost management
A company’s cost management is crucial for their business
to run efficiently. If costs exceed the profits it can have a
detrimental effect on the future of the firm. In the worst
case, poor cost management could even lead to bankruptcy.
However, tracking and managing a firm’s costs is not always
easy. Therefore, companies should emphasise the importance
of cost management and implement tools and metrics to help
managers understand their actions.
Research has shown that computerised tools can be bene-
ficial for managers in retaining that understanding [16]. As
mentioned, companies moving their operations to CC also
switch from CapEx to OpEx. Managers therefore have to
reevaluate how their cost management is handled which can
be difficult with limited resources.
As was just suggested, computerized tools can be beneficial
for understanding and managing cost. Microsoft Azure, for
instance, has some tools built in their PaaS platform which
can be a great start for a new way to manage cost. However,
managers should not be satisfied and stop at that point because
these tools may not be suited for that particular firm. Com-
panies have therefore started to build tools to analyse costs
on top of Microsoft Azure to tailor to the firms own specific
needs regarding cost management. This paper will provide an
example of what such a tool could look like.
III. R ELATED W ORK
Prediction of workload in CC services has been researched
extensively. Calheiros et al. [17] point out the importance of
understanding the future demand to provide good quality of
service, to avoid customer dissatisfaction and to avoid poten-
tially losing customers. Therefore, predicting the workload is
4
crucial to a company. In their paper, Calheiros et al. imple-
ment an ARIMA (Auto regressive moving average) model, a
variation of moving average, to make such a prediction. The
outcome was shown to perform with an average accuracy of
91 percent .
Further research, by Cao et al. [18], has utilized the en-
semble approach to predict for multiple steps from 5 to up
to 50 steps, where each step corresponds to 10 minutes.
The models used for the ensemble were most similar pattern
model, weighted nearest neighbor, weighted nearest neighbor
model for differenced data, exponential smoothing and autore-
gression. Overall, the ensemble model showed more accurate
results than the individual models. However, autoregression
– which is a part of ARIMA in the paper of Calheiros et
al. – performed the worst. Of course, the results are very
much dependent on the data provided, and direct comparisons
between the research can not be made in this context.
More recent research has instead applied machine learning
models, where types of ARIMA models have been the bench-
mark for the research. The reason being, as paper Duggan et al.
[5] suggests, that CPU utilization conforms to a non-stationary
pattern which ARIMA models do not apprehend like machine
learning models do.
Duggan et al. instead used a recurrent neural network
to predict CPU utilization data from the CoMon project, a
monitoring infrastructure for PlanetLab. The structure of the
data was aggregated of multiple virtual machines where each
step was 5 minutes of CPU utilization. With their recurrent
neural network, Duggan et al. were able to accurately predict
3 steps, or 15 minutes, into the future. The authors also
emphasize the importance of the model to predict further than
just one step ahead. The authors suggest up to 20 to 30 minutes
in prediction is suitable. By then data centre management
systems can reliably be informed of future demand and act
accordingly in time.
Moving average was one of the models used for comparison
to the recurrent neural network as a baseline model. When
predicting one step, the recurrent neural network was more
accurate compared to moving average. Similarly, multi-step
prediction of the recurrent neural network demonstrated better
result than moving average for up to 3 steps.
As future work the authors proposed the LSTM model as
a means for improvement which has been applied by others
[5]. The data in which Nashold et al. [19] used to predict
with LSTM have great similarities with the data used in
this paper’s research. Nashold et al. propose an alternative
comparable model to the LSTM instead of the simple moving
average with the SARIMA (Seasonal auto-regressive moving
average) model. However, as this research also suggest, the
result indicated LSTM to be superior in predicting time series
data, even though much of the analysed data was indicated to
be stationary.
IV. T HEORY
This section attempts to present all the non-trivial theory
necessary for understanding the methods used in this paper.
A. Time series prediction
The aim of this paper is to implement and compare different
techniques for forecasting future CPU utilization. Forecasting
is based on the assumption that previous occurrences influence
the future. With this assumption, predictions can be made for
future occurrences.
Mathematically, observations with respect to t through time
will be used to forecast the value ŷ at time t. The choice
of function f is crucial for making an accurate prediction.
However, making such a choice requires care and proper
analysis [20].
ŷt = f (x(t 1), x(t 2), x(t 3)...), (1)
B. Machine learning
The models that are compared in this paper are both
examples of machine learning. The area of machine learning
is one of the most prominent subjects of research. Therefore,
multiple fields within machine learning have emerged but
they all stem from the same set of rules. One of the most
popular and accepted definitions of machine learning is by
Tom Mitchell [21], ”A computer program is said to learn
from experience E with respect to some class of tasks T and
performance measure P, if its performance at tasks in T, as
measured by P, improves with experience E.1” . However, in
recent times a more modern definition has been created by Ian
Goodfellow. He defines machine learning in the following way,
”Machine learning is essentially a form of applied statistics
with increased emphasis on the use of computers to statisti-
cally estimate complicated functions and a decreased emphasis
on proving confidence intervals around these functions” [22].
The aim of a machine learning model is therefore to be
able to predict the correct outcome with the help of some
input using statistics to estimate this function accurately.
The function contains different types of parameters. There
are hyper-parameters which are set before training and there
are ordinary parameters which are updated during training
with the aim of minimizing or maximizing the cost function.
The ordinary parameters are then updated with the help of
an optimizer function which calculates the parameters that
optimize the cost function.
Furthermore, one of the sub-fields of machine learning that
recently has revolutionized the field is deep learning. The field
is inspired by the human brain and its connecting neurons. By
applying this philosophy to machines, the models are able to
perform as well as the human brain and even exceed humans.
However, the design of a brain and a neural network is far
from similar. Machines equivalent of neurons are called nodes.
A node is just a function which takes in data and spits out
another value with the help of a non-linear activation function.
Connecting multiple nodes together in layers creates a neural
network which has been proven to solve tasks which exceeds
 5

humans’ capacity. These layers are called hidden layers and

how many layers are needed and how to connect them depends
on the task. Therefore, multiple types of artificial neural
networks have been created to serve different tasks, like
recurrent neural networks (RNNs).

C. Recurrent neural networks

Figure 2. LSTM architecture with forget gate ft ,input gate it , output gate
ot [25]

1
(x) = x
(7)
1+e
Figure 1. RNN architecture, folded to the left and unfolded to the right [23]
ex e x
tanh(x) = (8)
A recurrent neural network (RNN) is one of the machine ex + e x
learning models that will be used for predictions in this paper. The difference between the forget gate and the input gate is
RNNs work by recurrently using the output from itself to ĉt function which will be used to update it which later will
predict next output with the help of the next input as shown be used in the next phase of calculation of the cell state ct
in Figure 1. Thus creating a sort of memory of past data. (14) which is then used to update the hidden state ht with the
Therefore, RNNs are well suited for sequenced data and time output gate vector.
series prediction. Furthermore, there exists different definitions
ĉt = tanh(Wc · [ht 1 , xt ]) + bc (9)
of standard RNNs. In this paper a standard RNN is defined
as an Elman network with the equations of the RNN shown
below [23]. c t = ft ⇤ c t 1 + it ⇤ ĉt (10)

ht = (Wh xt + Uh ht 1 + bh ) (2)
ht = ot ⇤ tanh(ct ) (11)

yt = (Wy ht + by )
The most basic of RNNs, have however a rather insufficient
memory because of the vanishing gradient problem [24].
Therefore, other types of RNNs were created to account for
the lack of memory to be able to remember longer sequences
to improve accuracy. One of these RNNs is called long short-
term memory (LSTM) which this paper uses to compare with
the standard RNN.
1) Long short-term memory: The LSTM architecture is
based on three gates: The forget gate ft (8), the input gate
it (9) and the output gate ot (10) [25]. An overall preview of
the architecture is shown in Figure 2.
ft = (Wf · [ht 1 , xt ]) + bf
it = (Wi · [ht 1 , xt ]) + bi
(3) The hidden state vector and the cell state vector are then
connected to the LSTM again to account for the recurrent
feature of the network. Therefore, with every iteration the
hidden state and the cell state is updated to fit the data
accordingly while the weights and biases stay the same until
updated with back-propagation through time (BPTT) [26].
2) Optimizer Adam: The optimizer which is used to update
the weights’ each input sequence during training is Adam
(adaptive moment estimation). The method uses an adaptive
learning rate to update the parameters. Meaning that the
learning rate for the parameters are individually updated.
Adam achieves this by using both the second and the first
gradient of the cost function, where mt is the mean and vt
is the uncentered variance. 1 and 2 are hyper-parameters
(4)
which is recommended to be initialized to 0.99 and 0.999
respectively.
(5)
mt = 1 mt 1 + (1 1 )gt (12)

ot = (Wo · [ht 1 , xt ]) + bo (6)

2
vt = 2 vt 1 + (1 2 )gt (13)
The activation function that is used in the LSTM cell is the
logistic function (8) and hyperbolic tangent (9). The logistic mt and vt are initialized to 0’s in the beginning which
function outputs values between 1 and 0. In this context, 1 contributes to a bias towards zero. To counteract this bias,
means a value that is remembered and 0 is disposed. The equations (12) and (13) are calculated and are used when
hyperbolic tangent function is used to update the input vector updating the weights with with equation (14). When updating
with values between -1 and 1. the weights, the authors of the Adam paper also recommend
6
setting the hyper-parameters ⌘ (learning rate) and ✏ to 0.001
and 10 7 respectively, which is rarely changed [27].
mt
m̂t = t (14)
1 1
vt
vˆt = (15)
1 t
2
⌘
✓t+1 = ✓ p m̂t (16)
vˆt + ✏
D. Machine learning implementation in practice
In practice, implementing a machine learning model to
solve a problem can be a nuisance and demand persistence.
Successfully finding an accurate model is not a trivial task.
Having a systematical design framework when implementing
a machine learning model can be a savior. Therefore, this paper
adheres to the following common practices.
Andrew Ng proposes four key points to consider for a
practitioner [28]:
• Determine your goals - what error metric are you going
to use and what your target value is. The goals and error
metrics should be driven by the task the machine learning
model is intended to solve.
• Set up a end-to-end pipeline as soon as possible. To
also make sure to find an appropriate estimation of the
performance metrics.
• Measure the system accordingly to find performance
bottlenecks in the model due to over-fitting, under-fitting,
defects in data or software bugs.
• Frequently make incremental changes in regards to find-
ing more data, adjusting hyper-parameters, or changing
model based on findings regarding performance bottle-
necks.
With this design framework in mind, there are also three
fundamental concepts within machine learning that should be
elaborated upon.
1) Error measurements: There exists an abundance of stan-
dard error measurements. Which measurement that eventually
gets chosen should stem from the characteristics of the prob-
lem that the model is facing. The chosen error measurement
can then be used to measure the models performance. A
better performing model will produce smaller errors. One
measurement of a models performance is the mean square
error (MSE) [22].
m
1 X
M SE = (ŷ y)2i , (17)
m i
Upon examination of the equation above, it is apparent
that if the predictions, ŷ, are closer to the real values, y,
the error becomes smaller. When squaring the difference of
the prediction and real value, three things happen. Firstly,
it is ensured that all summed values are positive to avoid
positive and negative values cancelling each other and thus
underestimating the error. Secondly, larger individual errors
receive greater punishment since their weight in the final error
will be greater than the weight of their initial size. Thirdly,
the dimension of the measured error unit changes. The m
in the equation is the total number of predictions and by
dividing with m the mean squared error of all the predictions
is obtained.
The fact that the error becomes smaller when – and even
0 when predictions are completely accurate (although this is
unlikely) – can be taken advantage of when training a machine
learning model [22]. To improve the performance the model
simply has to reduce the error.
As mentioned there are many different measures to choose
from and they should be chosen with regards to the problem
at hand. To broaden the perspectives and help interpretation of
results a second error measurement was chosen as well, mean
absolute error (MAE).
m
1 X
M AE = |(ŷ y)i |, (18)
m i
Unlike MSE, the MAE is only a function of one charac-
teristic instead of three. MSE can therefore be a more natural
error measurement to interpret [29].
2) Training and testing: Furthermore, one should acknowl-
edge the importance of how to go about testing the model’s
performance. The provided data is not recommended to fully
be used when training the algorithm. The reason for this is
because of the implication of then measuring the algorithms
performance to generalize. Therefore, is is recommended to
split the data in a training set, validation set and a test set
with a common ratio of 8:1:1. The training set and validation
set is used during training, where the validation set is used to
alert for over-fitting of the training data. The test set is used
to understand how the model performs on unseen data and it
is therefore attractive to adjust the model to find the lowest
possible test error.
3) Baseline models: When having calculated a test error the
question of what a decent error result is emerges. In practice,
the error will never reach 0 so a practitioner has to find
another way of bench-marking the test error [22]. What is most
commonly used is a baseline model which is not necessary
a machine learning model. For time series prediction, there
exists plenty of methods but moving average and weighted
moving average are two common ones. Moving average is
simply calculated as:
m
1 X
ŷt+1 = yi , (19)
m i=t m
where t+1 is the next time-step to be predicted and m is
the total number of steps to be used in the average.
If the test error is worse than the baseline model, the
practitioner should then use the design framework’s fourth key
point and change the model accordingly.
E. One-way ANOVA
To ensure that results are faithful, an analysis of variance
(ANOVA) is used. First a null-hypothesis must be established.
If the null-hypothesis were to be true, there is no significance
to be found in the results. An alternative hypothesis which is

considered true if the null-hypothesis is rejected must also be
prepared.
An F-test is then conducted to calculate the probability (p-
value) of the null-hypothesis being false. If the probability
is below a chosen probability called ↵, five percent being a
common threshold for ↵, the null-hypothesis can be rejected
and the alternative hypothesis be considered as truthful [30].
F. Central Processing Unit (CPU)
Since a general understanding of a CPU is beneficial for
the full understanding of this paper, a simple explanation is
provided.
The central processing unit is the primary component to
process instructions in a machine. These instructions vary from
logical, arithmetic, controls and I/O (input/output) operations.
Essentially, the CPU is the brain of a machine. The interpre-
tation of the data processed in the CPU is in the form of
bytes, 1’s and 0’s. The particular operation process to execute
commands is called the instruction cycle. The instruction is
divided into three stages: fetch, decode and execute. First
some data is fetched in bytes from the program memory. The
instructions are then decoded into signals which the internal
components of the CPU can comprehend. The CPU can then
start processing the instruction and make the executions in the
form of actions [31].
V. M ETHODOLOGY
This section details how the study was conducted. First the
data used for the experiments is explained in detail. Then
follows an overview of which models were used and how they
were implemented.
A. Description of dataset
The data used to train and test the models was received
by the engineering consultancy firm Afry (Afry is their brand
name, the company is formally called ÅF Pöyry AB). Afry
operates globally but the lion’s share of operations is within
Europe, and in particular across Scandinavia. As a conse-
quence the behavior of the roughly 16000 employees will to a
great extent be related to Scandinavian office hours, weekdays
and holidays. This is apparent in Figure 3 which will be
discussed in more detail.
The data reaches from March 21 to May 10, year 2021
and is from a database with company news connected to the
intranet. Every time an employee logs into the intranet or visits
Figure 3. CPU percentage utilization from March 21 to May 10, 2021 (outliers removed in graph to improve readability)
7
the main page a request is made to read the database so news
can be displayed. Each read, write or delete operation requires
CPU power, and more active users requires more CPU power.
In Figure 3 a pattern is discernible. The first day in the
dataset is a Sunday which can be seen as low activity in the
figure. During the weeks higher activity can be seen at the start
of the workdays with a decline throughout the day. During the
weekends the activity is close to 0. The second week coincided
with Easter holiday on Friday stretching to Monday, which is
reflected as low activity for those days in the figure.
The data points in the dataset are the Max CPU Utilization
Percentage for each minute during the months that the dataset
stretches over. A choice was made to use max CPU utilization
instead of average CPU utilization to avoid under-provisioning.
In total there are 58691 data points.
B. Forecasting models used
Three different forecasting models are implemented:
1) LSTM,
2) Standard RNN,
3) Moving Average.
LSTM and standard RNN are both part of this paper’s research
whereas moving average will serve as a baseline model
for analysing results. Since LSTM is a type of RNN, the
parameters that need to be chosen are identical for LSTM
and standard RNN.
For the first research question each model uses the 60
previous minutes as input to predict one step, or one minute,
ahead. The second research question uses the same number
of input steps but to instead predict several steps ahead. Both
the LSTM and RNN have 1 feature as input (historical CPU),
meaning they are univariate, and use 11 hidden hidden units
to produce 1 output. Adam is used as an optimizer for both
LSTM and RNN, and the learning rate was 0.001.
Moving average also used 60 input steps since it is fair
to compare them under the same conditions. If a different
amount of input steps were to be chosen it would complicate
comparing performance since one model used less input for
its predictions which an entirely different aspect that would
need to be considered.
C. Procedure
In order to be able to train the LSTM and RNN models,
the input data X was reshaped into the dimensions (number
8
of occurrences, number of timesteps in the sequence, number
of features). The dimensions of X in this paper was (73364,
60, 1). Each occurrence sequence Xt was then matched with
the next value in the dataset to the output yt . Furthermore, the
datasets X and y were divided into 58691 data points (80%)
for training, 7337 points (10%) for validation and 7337 points
(10%) for testing. Outlier data points were observed in the
training data but were not removed.
The experiments were conducted in two parts; one part for
each research question.
1) First research question: The goal with the first part was
to compare the results of the LSTM with RNN to see which
performs better for one step ahead. Moving average was used
as a naive algorithm baseline for comparison. If the models do
not outperform the naive baseline, then they can be regarded
as useless.
First, the neural networks were trained on the training
dataset over 150 epochs. MSE is used as the loss function for
both models. If the validation loss – the loss when the model
tests itself on the validation dataset – increased for 3 con-
secutive epochs, then the training was stopped early to avoid
over-fitting. The validation MSE error was then optimized by
manually tuning the hyper-parameters accordingly.
All three models then used the test data – data which
they had not seen before – to make predictions. The models
repeatedly use 60 input steps to predict one step ahead over
the whole test data set. Two measurements of error are used
as result of models’ performance: mean squared error (MSE)
and mean absolute error (MAE). The error measurements are
calculated using the predicted values compared with the actual
values of the test data set.
The reasoning behind using two measurements of error is
to get more insight into the type and magnitude of the errors
made. MAE will be of the same dimension as the predicted
value and thus easier to translate into what impact the error
could have on a real world application. By comparing MSE
with MAE it is also possible to get an indication whether a
few large errors were made (since they are given more weight
in MSE) or if many smaller errors were made.
The whole procedure was done four times over to calculate
a standard deviation of the error measurement. The presented
error measurement results are the average error measurements
of all four passes.
2) Second research question: The second part was con-
ducted in a similar manner to the first part. The objective was
to determine how many minutes into the future the LSTM is
able to accurately predict, with a cap at 30 minutes. The same
neural networks trained in part one were used. Again, 60 input
steps were used to predict the subsequent values. To predict
n minutes ahead the model made n predictions single-step
predictions. The predicted value was then seen by model as
the latest ”true” value in the 60 previous values that are used as
inputs for then next prediction, meaning it replaced the oldest
value of input values used in the previous prediction.
The errors were counted for the last and final step. It was
decided to only count the final step since what ”path” the
model took to get to the final value is not important. Rather,
the intended purpose is predicting what the CPU utilization
will be in up to 30 minutes.
The results of the LSTM were compared to both RNN and
moving average as baselines. Again, error measurements are
used as result of performance.
Like the previous research question, the procedure was car-
ried out four times over to calculate a standard deviation of the
error measurements. Again, the presented error measurement
results are the average of all four passes.
D. Code implementation
When implementing the machine learning models Python
was used together with the libraries Tensorflow and Keras
to build the model frameworks for RNN and LSTM. The
Keras library which sits on top of Tensorflow can create a
model with a few lines of code [32]. LSTM and RNN are
as mentioned both recurrent neural networks which makes the
algorithm identical except for changing the model from LSTM
to SimpleRNN in Keras and vice versa. Below the algorithm
in pseudo code is provided.
Algorithm 1 for LSTM/RNN model
Input: input data format:
(number of occurences, timesteps in sequence, features)
Output: trained model Initialisation : Prepare training, val-
idation and test data with ratio 8:1:1 for input (X) and
output (y)
1: Create Sequential model
2: Add LSTM/RNN layer with number of units and input
shape: (timesteps, features)
3: Add Dense layer with 1 unit with linear activation function
4: compile model with mean squared error as loss function
5: train model with the provided data
E. Hypothesis testing
To determine whether the differences in the calculated error
metrics between LSTM and RNN were statistically significant,
the one-way ANOVA test was used.
The null-hypothesis was formulated as ”there is no sig-
nificant difference between the means of the models”. Con-
sequently, the alternative hypothesis could be formulated as
”there is a significant difference between the results of the
models”.
P-values were calculated using 5 occurrences from each
model. The Python library Scipy was used for these calcu-
lations. The threshold ↵ was decided to be five percent. If the
resulting p-values are below 0.05, the null-hypothesis can be
rejected.
VI. R ESULT
This section provides the obtained results of the experiments
that were conducted. First the findings from single-step pre-
diction of CPU utilization are presented followed by the multi-
step prediction.
 9

A. Single-step prediction B. Multi-step prediction

Table I shows the accuracy of the three models used in In case of the multi-step predictions, the deviation from the
this experiment. Both mean squared error (MSE) and mean real data for the RNN and LSTM is larger than the previous
absolute error (MAE) were used to better comprehend the single-step predictions. Looking at Table II, both MAE and
accuracy of the models. Looking at Table I, with all three MSE are larger, regardless of it being 10, 20 or 30 steps.
cases, MSE and MAE correlated with each other such that if Looking at the results for 10 steps ahead, RNN has lower MSE
one of the two was higher, the other one was higher as well. and MAE than moving average for single-step. Furthermore,
Perhaps suggesting that none of the models were too volatile LSTM still retains relatively better accuracy in performance
in their predictions with varying large and small errors but compared to moving average and RNN, which still perform
instead somewhat consistent. well for 30 steps. Comparing MSE and MAE between RNN
For moving average the deviations were non-existent, which and LSTM, the errors for LSTM at 20 steps are lower than
is excepted due to the nature of the model simply using an the errors at 10 steps for RNN.
average each passing. For both RNN and LSTM the deviations Like the first research question, the standard deviations for
were just a small fraction of the respective error results. both RNN and LSTM were small compared to the errors
Moving average had the highest MSE and MAE and LSTM themselves.
had the lowest. As expected, the differences of MSE between Table II
the algorithms were much larger than the differences in MAE. M ULTI - STEP : AVERAGE ACCURACY ON TEST DATA
N umber of steps Algorithm Error metrics
Table I MSE (st.dev) MAE (st.dev)
S INGLE - STEP : AVERAGE ACCURACY ON TEST DATA 10 steps RNN 1.0768 (0.0432) 0.7273 (0.0128)
Algorithm Error metrics LSTM 0.9353 (0.0161) 0.6848 (0.0045)
MSE (st.dev) MAE (st.dev) 20 steps RNN 1.3114 (0.0491) 0.7933 (0.0135)
Moving Average 1.1663 (0.0000) 0.7373 (0.0000) LSTM 1.0225 (0.0233) 0.7113 (0.0069)
RNN 0.9199 (0.0193) 0.6782 (0.0058) 30 steps RNN 1.6145 (0.0336) 0.8650 (0.0122)
LSTM 0.8755 (0.0070) 0.6643 (0.0018) LSTM 1.1247 (0.0349) 0.7439 (0.0098)

Furthermore, by visually inspecting the predictions in Figure
4 it is apparent that all three methods have made fairly accurate
predictions and follows the pattern pretty well. A few decimals
of difference in MSE and MAE does not seem to be sufficient
to completely disqualify any of the methods used. However,
while the statement holds true, the moving average seems to
predict prematurely compared to the real data which in turn
impairs the accuracy of the prediction.
When observing the RNN and the LSTM, both methods
converge with a similar pattern with a few distinctions. LSTM
seems more adept at predicting the peaks, nevertheless, it also
often falls short here.
Compared with Figure 4, both predictions in Figure 5 are
less accurate and less smooth as a result. The most drastic
change is the RNN prediction where the model has piece-
wise linear patterns which do not correspond to the real
data whatsoever. LSTM behaved better overall which was
confirmed by the error metrics in table 2. Where both models
struggled the most was still during drastic change of CPU
capacity.

Figure 5. Visualized 30-step predictions of 30 percent of test data

With further investigation regarding performance during

Figure 4. Visualized single-step prediction of 30 percent of test data
While predicting one step (one minute) at a time has some
relevancy for comparing models, its practical applications are
less apparent. In practice the multi-step prediction would be
much more useful.
CPU capacity peaks, Figure 6 confirms earlier observations.
During low workload, both the RNN and the LSTM made
significant results compared to high workloads. Comparing the
models, LSTM is still more adaptable during these high peaks.
However, the MAE is still by large affected of the deviations
during high peaks. During low workload, the MAE is around
0.5 which is lower than the aggregated single-step prediction
10
Figure 6. MAE calculated over 50 data points comparing RNN and LSTM
for 30 predicted steps
with around 0.18 less. While during the peaks the errors of
LSTM are up between 1.5 to 2.0 and the RNN is drastically
above 2.0 to 3.5. The range of MAE are therefore drastically
larger than RNN compared to LSTM.
C. Statistical significance of results
In regards to the hypothesis test for the calculated error
metrics between RNN and LSTM, table 3 shows that both
MSE and MAE are statistically significant. The p-values for
single-step and 30 steps are both drastically below the chosen
threshold for ↵ which was five percent. This result shows that
the differences are not due to chance. Comparing the single-
step result with multi-step result shows that the further into the
future that the models predict, the smaller the p-values seem
to appear.
Table III
ANOVA TEST: P- VALUE FOR ERROR METRICS
N umber of steps Error metrics
MSE p-value MAE p-value
Single step 0.00129 0.00091
30 steps 1.55916e-08 1.27780e-07
VII. D ISCUSSION
First of all, the results of the ANOVA test shows that
the results are trustworthy and not due to chance. Therefore
further discussion is justified. The results themselves seem to
suggest that LSTM is an improvement of the standard RNN.
Both LSTM and RNN also appear to outperform the baseline,
moving average, which is an important aspect to consider.
There are some considerations that have to be kept in mind
however. These considerations will be discussed after a more
thorough analysis of the results.
A. Result takeaways
1) First research question: The aim with the first research
question was to see if LSTM could outperform the RNN,
since RNN had seen success in previous work. When tested
on previously unseen data, LSTM obtained better results than
both RNN and the baseline moving average, with regards
to the statistical significant MAE and MSE. The noteworthy
results indicate that the LSTM model is superior in retaining
information from previously seen data.
Comparing both error metrics, MSE was larger than MAE
but less so for LSTM. Thus indicating that LSTM does
not make relatively big errors that are heavily punished by
MSE, but rather makes many small errors. This could be
an advantage as it might instill confidence in the models
predictions. Although it will not be completely accurate, the
model is reliable in such a way that it will usually be near
the truth and not completely wrong. The standard deviations
were negligible when compared to the errors themselves and
thus indicating that the results are trustworthy and not due to
mere chance.
One predicament, that can be seen in Figure 4, is that the
model consistently underestimated the volatility of the peaks.
Visually, the moving average is seemingly better at conforming
to the largest peak. However, this is not aligned with the error
metrics calculated. One reason for this can be that the moving
average is great with almost a linear data structure by its inherit
algorithm. Therefore, the moving average can be interpreted
as descent were the data is somewhat stationary but do not
perform during non-stationary intervals which the LSTM is
much better suited for.
2) Second research question: The purpose of the second
research question was to see if the model could actually be
useful in practice. For it to be useful, it would require an
ability to predict up to 30 minutes into the future. The reason
being that, currently, it is not possible to adjust capacity with
just a minute’s notice.
As expected, predicting multiple steps ahead was associated
with greater errors compared to the single-step predictions
while still being statistically significant. Interestingly though,
MSE increased significantly more than MAE and it seems to
correlate with how many steps were predicted. The simple
reason for this pattern could be that predicted previous steps
are used to predict the next step. Therefore, the next step
inherits the other steps’ deviations from the original data.
One aspect of the result of the multi-step prediction is that
the LSTM errors for 20 steps are lower than RNN at 10 steps.
Suggesting that the LSTM can predict 10 minutes further than
the RNN. A result which mostly can be attributed to how the
models predict during peaks.
With Figure 6 clarifying the structure of the errors, the
largest MAE errors can be seen to arise during the peaks
of workload. Creating an algorithm that can diminish these
errors during large changes in workload could perform even
better than this LSTM. Regardless, with 30 steps predicted, the
LSTM only had a MAE error of around 0.74. A translation
in simple terms is that the LSTM deviated on average with
0.74 percent of the true CPU capacity. An error which may
not negatively affect the uncertainty too much in managers’
decision making.
B. Applicability for businesses
Since companies will incorporate cloud based solutions in
their businesses, tools to help guide the managers to make

better decisions will be important. The reason is because of
the complexity of data and cloud management that companies
have to account for. Therefore, making some tasks automated
and liberating managers to focus on more difficult tasks at
hand can indeed be beneficial.
One task that could be automated with accurate predictive
tools is regulating the cloud capacity. Making sure that the
business is not overpaying for the cloud providers’ services
while still operating at an optimal level. Predictive models
such as the LSTM can therefore be a great tool to have in a
company’s toolbox. To excel even more, the model should be
integrated with additional software to be able to change the
amount of vCores needed during a particular time. This will
indeed demand more ingenious work to handle. However, if
the benefits transcend the drawbacks, the question of acting
upon an implementation should be an obvious choice.
While the incentive of creating an optimizing tool usually
is budgetary, managers should acknowledge the environmental
aspect of using excessive computing power in their businesses.
Cloud waste can to some extent be minimized from the
provider but the best understanding of ones business is retained
by the ones who operate that business. Therefore, making the
argument that cloud waste is not only an issue that has to
be solved on the host end of the cloud, but rather as a co-
operation by the involved parts. A step in the right direction
to achieving zero cloud waste could be by implementing a
tool incorporating a model similar to the LSTM. Saving both
managers’ time and effort in the processes while reducing
unnecessary cost and keeping the ecological footprint at a
minimum.
C. Other considerations
When analysing results there are a few points that are
believed to be very important to bear in mind. In total six
considerations are presented.
Firstly, very little data (given the context) was used to train
the model. The model still seems to perform well but the
results can likely be improved upon. In the real world one way
to improve performance is to collect more data. However, the
collection of data must be contrasted to the expected benefit
from improved results [22].
In the context of this paper’s research, collecting more data
requires little effort but a lot of time and patience; Microsoft
Azure only stores historical minute-wise data for the past
month. What is believed to be more important in this context is
that having a model which performs well with as little training
data as possible could in itself be an advantage.
Secondly, this paper only uses a univariate LSTM. It is very
likely that a multivariate model (a model which uses more than
one feature) could produce better results. Examples of features
to consider are: hour in the day, day of the week, weekend or
workday, holiday or not and so on. An attempt was made to
use a multivariate LSTM but gave up at an early stage due to
bad performance, which is believed to be due to the curse of
dimensionality [22]. The curse of dimensionality entails the
need for more data, which could be seen as a disadvantage
when evaluating the model holistically. Thirdly, the data was
11
not very volatile. It followed a somewhat clear pattern over the
weeks and in addition the CPU utilization percentage remained
low even during the peaks. It is difficult to say how the model
would fare if there was a bigger spread between the peaks and
troughs.
Fourthly, when evaluating the model on the testing data,
it still came from the same company. Thus it is not known
how well the trained model generalizes to other companies.
If it is possible to develop a model that generalizes between
similar companies it would be advantageous. This would
enable companies without much data of their own, or com-
putational capacity to train a model on their existing data, to
instead implement a pre-trained model. Perhaps eliminating
the problems that were mentioned as being associated with
collecting more data.
Fifthly, what is considered a good result is very much
subjective. When comparing the models it is reasonable to
say that the LSTM achieved good results if it outperformed
both the RNN and the baseline moving average. In the eyes
of a manager, however, it is difficult to say what is regarded
as a good enough result. A good enough result could be both
higher or lower, and it could differ between managers.
Lastly, if a company were to apply this there is an important
problem that has to be solved for it to be practical. The
problem stems from the fact that the measurement used is CPU
utilization percentage. If the company adjusts the numbers of
vCores, meaning increased or decreased computational power,
the model has no understanding of how it affects the measure-
ment. To solve this, the values must somehow be translated to
a different measurement of computional power which might
require collaborating with the cloud service providers.
VIII. C ONCLUSION
When embarking upon this research topic the aim was to
increase the ability to predict CPU utilization of a cloud server
by using an LSTM. Previous research had showed that RNN
performs with this type of prediction and this paper shows
that LSTM outperforms the RNN, although on a somewhat
different dataset with a clearer pattern. With little training data
the LSTM was able to obtain results with a high degree of
accuracy for one-step predictions as well as up to 30 steps.
Even if a few uncertainties remain that need to be solved
before this paper’s findings can see practical use without
afterthought, the findings should at least serve as a proof of
concept. This paper has showed that:
1) LSTM outperforms a standard RNN when predicting
CPU utilization,
2) LSTM can predict CPU utilization up to 30 steps (30
minutes) while retaining a high degree of accuracy.
IX. F UTURE WORK
As mentioned, several uncertainties remain which could
be investigated in future work for other researchers. These
suggestions are:
1) Train an LSTM model with more data and with data of
a different pattern,
12

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