Browsing by Author "Van Greunen, Manrich"
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- ItemForecasting methods for cloud hosted resources, a comparison(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2015-12) Van Greunen, Manrich; Engelbrecht, H. A.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Engeneering. Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Cloud computing has revolutionised the modern day IT industry and continues to foster the development of new products and services. Amid the dynamically changing workloads presented to cloud computing lies the challenge of ensuring sufficient resources are available when needed. Recently, proactive provisioning and auto-scaling schemes have emerged as solutions to this. Forecasting methods are inherent to these provisioning schemes and to the author's knowledge, no formal investigation has been performed in comparing different forecasting methods. The purpose of this research was to investigate various forecasting methods presented in recent research, adapt evaluation metrics from literature and compare these methods on prediction performance using two real-life cloud resource datasets. It was found that less complex methods, such as moving average and autoregression outperformed other more complex methods that were investigated, on the majority of used evaluation metrics. We also found that our 30th order auto-regression model achieved statistically significantly better results compared to the other forecasting methods. Furthermore, there was no single evaluation metric that gave concise comparative results between forecasting methods, but overload likelihood ratio as metric showed great promise to this end. It was argued that focus should be put on developing evaluation metrics that specifically relate to the cloud environment and further investigation should be performed on a closed-loop system or real-life cloud platform. Cloud computing has become ubiquitous with the Internet as we know it today. We believe that effective provisioning of cloud computing resources should be at the core of modern cloud management systems and the primary objective of cloud platform providers.