A resource allocation algorithm of multi-cloud resources based on Markov Decision Process

Cloud technologies can nowadays be considered as commodities. The possibility of getting access to storage, computing and networking virtual resources empowers any business that needs dynamic IT capabilities. The Cloud Management Broker (CMB) plays a crucial role to handle heterogeneous virtualized cloud resources in order to offer a unique set of interfaces to the cloud users. Moreover, the CMB is in charge of optimizing the usage of the cloud resources, satisfying the requirements declared by the users. This paper proposes a novel multi-cloud resource allocation algorithm, based on a Markov Decision Process (MDP), capable of dynamically assigning the resources requests to a set of IT resources (storage or computing resources), with the aim of maximizing the expected CMB revenue. Simulation results show the feasibility and the higher performances obtained by the proposed algorithm, compared to a greedy approach. © 2013 IEEE.