Resource Central

Cloud research to date has lacked data on the characteristics of the production virtual machine (VM) workloads of large cloud providers. A thorough understanding of these characteristics can inform the providers' resource management systems, e.g. VM scheduler, power manager, server health manager. In this paper, we first introduce an extensive characterization of Microsoft Azure's VM workload, including distributions of the VMs' lifetime, deployment size, and resource consumption. We then show that certain VM behaviors are fairly consistent over multiple lifetimes, i.e. history is an accurate predictor of future behavior. Based on this observation, we next introduce Resource Central (RC), a system that…