HeporCloud: An energy and performance efficient resource orchestrator for hybrid heterogeneous cloud computing environments

In major Information Technology (IT) companies such as Google, Rackspace and Amazon Web Services (AWS), virtualisation and containerisation technologies are usually used to execute customers' workloads and applications. The computational resources are provided through large-scale datacenters, which consume substantial amount of energy and have, therefore, ecological impacts. Since long, Google runs users' applications in containers, Rackspace offers bare-metal hardware, whereas AWS runs them either in VMs (EC2), containers (ECS) and/or containers inside VMs (Lambda); therefore, making resource management a tedious activity. The role of a resource management system is of the greatest importance, principally, if IT companies practice various kinds of sand-boxing technologies, for instance, bare-metal, VMs, containers, and/or nested containers in their data centers (hybrid platforms). The absence of centralised, workload-aware resource managers and consolidation policies produces questions on datacenters energy efficiency, workloads performance, and users' costs. In this paper, we demonstrate, through several experiments, using the Google workload data for 12,583 hosts and approximately one million tasks that belong to four different kinds of workload, the likelihood of: (i) using workload-aware resource managers in hybrid clouds; (ii) achieving energy and cost savings, in heterogeneous hybrid datacenters such that the workload performance is not affected, negatively; and (iii) how various allocation policies, combined with different migration approaches, will impact on datacenter's energy and performance efficiencies. Using plausible assumptions for hybrid datacenters set-up, our empirical evaluation suggests that, for no migration, a single scheduler is at most 16.86% more energy efficient than distributed schedulers. Moreover, when migrations are considered, our resource manager can save up to 45.61% energy and can improve up to 17.9% workload performance.