Elastic virtual network function placement

Nowadays, many cloud providers offer Virtual Network Function (VNF) services that are dynamically scaled according to the workload. Enterprises enjoy these services by only paying for the actual consumed resources. From a cloud provider's standpoint, the cost of these services must be kept as low as possible, while QoS is maintained and service downtime is minimized. In this paper, we introduce Elastic Virtual Network Function Placement (EVNFP) problem and present a model for minimizing operational costs in providing VNF services. In this model, the elasticity overhead and the trade-off between bandwidth and host resource consumption are considered together, while the previous works ignored this perspective of the problem. We propose a solution called Simple Lazy Facility Location (SLFL) that optimizes the placement of VNF instances in response to on-demand workload. Our experiments suggest that SLFL can accept two times more workload while incurring similar operational cost compared to first-fit and random placements.