QoS-Based Pricing and Scheduling of Batch Jobs in OpenStack Clouds

The current Cloud infrastructure services (IaaS) market employs a resource-based selling model: customers rent nodes from the provider and pay per-node per-unit-time. This selling model places the burden upon customers to predict their job resource requirements and durations. Inaccurate prediction by customers can result in over-provisioning of resources, or under-provisioning and poor job performance. Thanks to improved resource virtualization and multi-tenant performance isolation, as well as common frameworks for batch jobs, such as MapReduce, Cloud providers can predict job completion times more accurately. We offer a new definition of QoS-levels in terms of job completion times and we present a new QoS-based selling mechanism for batch jobs in a multi-tenant OpenStack cluster. Our experiments show that the QoS-based solution yields up to 40% improvement over the revenue of more standard selling mechanisms based on a fixed per-node price across various demand and supply conditions in a 240-VCPU OpenStack cluster.