A Stacked Generalization Based Meta-Classifier for Prediction Of Cloud Workload

Cloud computing has revolutionized the way software, platforms, and infrastructure can be acquired by making them available as on-demand services that can be accessed from anywhere via a web browser. Due to its ubiquitous nature Cloud data centers continuously experience fluctuating workloads which demands for dynamic resource provisioning. These workloads are either placed on Virtual Machines (VMs) or containers which abstract the underlying physical resources deployed at the data center. A proactive or reactive method can be used to allot required resources to the workload. Reactive approaches tend to be inefficient as it takes a significant amount of time to configure the resources to meet the change in demands. A proactive approach for resource management is better in meeting workload demands as it makes an appropriate number of resources available in advance to cater to the fluctuations in workload. The success of such an approach relies on the ability of the resource management module of a data center to accurately predict future workloads. Machine Learning (ML) has already proven itself to be very effective in performing prediction in various domains. In this work, we propose an ML meta-classifier based on stacked generalization for predicting future workloads utilising the past workload trends which are recorded as event logs at Cloud data centers. The proposed model showed a prediction accuracy of 98.5% indicating its applicability for the Cloud environment where SLA requirements must be closely adhered to.