Resource Management in Cloud Platform as a Service Systems: Analysis and Opportunities

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) clouds offer services to automate the deployment and management of applications, relieving application owners of the complexity of managing the underlying infrastructure resources. However, application owners have an increasingly larger diversity and volume of workloads, which they want to execute at minimum cost while maintaining desired performance guarantees. In this paper we investigate how existing PaaS systems cope with this challenge. In particular, we first present a taxonomy of commonly-encountered design decisions regarding how PaaS systems manage underlying resources. We then use this taxonomy to analyze an extensive set of PaaS systems targeting different application domains. Based on this analysis, we identify several future research opportunities in the PaaS design space, which will enable PaaS owners to reduce hosting costs while coping with the workload variety.