Policy-Based Scheduling of Cloud Services

Worldwide accessibility of clouds brings great benefits by providing easy access to resources. However, scheduling cloud resources for utilization among multiple collaborating cloud users is still often executed manually. To address this problem, we developed a scheduling service for cloud middleware that guarantees optimal resource utilization in terms of a total number of used resources in a given interval based on user-defined policies. In the paper, we introduce the scheduling algorithm, describe its supporting system architecture and provide the evaluation that proves the feasibility of the developed solution. The provided scheduling algorithm takes into account dependencies between individual services, and can enforce common use of shared resources that lead to the optimal resource utilization. By assuring continuous schedule optimality, costs caused by unnecessary usage of additional cloud resources are minimized.