Virtual Machine Provisioning for Applications with Multiple Deadlines in Resource-Constrained Clouds (Extended Version)

Recently, several studies have considered applications with a single time constraint (i.e., deadline) running on cloud systems. In this work, to effectively support user requests with flexible timing constraints (e.g., users may prefer expedited services and are willing to pay extra for getting their job processed at earlier times), we consider applications with multiple deadlines for being processed in resource-constrained cloud systems and investigate corresponding virtual machine (VM) provisioning schemes. Specifically, by considering the multiple deadline-bid pairs of user requests, we propose a Slope-based Time-Sensitive Resource Factor with Dominant Resource being considered to prioritize such requests. In addition, we study the mapping schemes that allocate the multiple VMs of a user request to only one or multiple computing nodes, which are denoted as Bundled vs. Distributed mappings, respectively. The evaluation results show that, compared to the single deadline schemes, the proposed VM provisioning schemes with multiple deadlines and distributed mapping can significantly improve the overall resource utilization and system benefit.