Transferable Knowledge for Low-cost Decision Making in Cloud Environments

Samreen, Faiza and Blair, Gordon and Elkhatib, Yehia (2022) Transferable Knowledge for Low-cost Decision Making in Cloud Environments. IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, 10 (3). 2190 - 2203. ISSN 2168-7161

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Abstract

Users of IaaS are increasingly overwhelmed with the wide range of providers and services offered by each provider. As such, many users select cloud services based on description alone. An emerging alternative is to use a decision support system (DSS), which typically relies on gaining insights from observational data in order to assist a customer in making decisions regarding optimal deployment or redeployment of cloud applications. The primary activity of such systems is the generation of a prediction model (e.g. using machine learning), which requires a significantly large amount of training data. However, considering the varying architectures of applications, cloud providers, and cloud offerings, this activity is not sustainable as it incurs additional time and cost to collect training data and subsequently train the models. We overcome this through developing a Transfer Learning (TL) approach where the knowledge (in the form of the prediction model and associated data set) gained from running an application on a particular cloud infrastructure is transferred in order to substantially reduce the overhead of building new models for the performance of new applications and/or cloud infrastructures. Our evaluation shows that the proposed scheme increases overall efficiency with a factor of 60% reduction in the time and cost of generating a new prediction model.