Modeling and deploying hybrid tenant requests with shared networklets

Abstract In recent years, IaaS providers are trying to cater to application layer development, PaaS providers are exposing more infrastructure APIs to customers, and SaaS providers start to allow tenants to build their apps within their software. All of these indicate that, the popular wisdom that cloud computing comes in three flavors—IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS—no longer describes reality. The lines between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS are becoming blurred as datacenter providers seek to create cloud platforms that can satisfy the needs of enterprises and widen their appeal to developers. In hybrid datacenters, resource requests from tenants are increasingly transforming into hybrid requests that may simultaneously demand IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS resources. This paper tackles the challenge of modeling and deploying hybrid tenant resource requests in datacenter networks, for which we coin “networklet” to represent a set of VMs that collaboratively provide some PaaS or SaaS service. Through extracting networklets from tenant requests and thus sharing them between multiple tenants, we can achieve a win-win situation for datacenter providers and tenants. Extensive evaluations show that, the proposed model and deployment algorithm indeed reduce the completion time of tenant requests while maintaining performance guarantee.