Title: A survey on auto-scaling: how to exploit cloud elasticity

Authors: Marta Catillo; Umberto Villano; Massimiliano Rak

Addresses: DING, Università Del Sannio, Benevento, Italy ' DING, Università Del Sannio, Benevento, Italy ' Università Della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, Caserta, Aversa, Italy

Abstract: Elasticity plays an essential role as far as the wide diffusion of cloud computing is concerned. It enables a cloud application deployment to 'scale' automatically, adapting to workload changes, guaranteeing the performance requirements with minimum infrastructure leasing costs. However, auto-scaling poses challenging problems. This paper gives a detailed overview of the current state of the art on auto-scaling. Firstly, the key design points for auto-scaling tools are presented and discussed. Then, literature proposals and on-going research are dealt with. Finally, existing auto-scaling implementations, including those used by commercial cloud providers, are reviewed.

Keywords: cloud computing; auto-scaling; resource provisioning; elasticity; QoS; service level agreement; scalable applications.

DOI: 10.1504/IJGUC.2023.129702

International Journal of Grid and Utility Computing, 2023 Vol.14 No.1, pp.37 - 50

Received: 05 Nov 2020
Accepted: 06 May 2021
Published online: 21 Mar 2023 *