EC3: Elastic Cloud Computing Cluster

This paper introduces Elastic Cloud Computing Cluster (EC3), a tool that creates elastic virtual clusters on top of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Clouds. The clusters are self-managed entities that scale out to a larger number of nodes on demand, up to a maximum size specified by the user. Whenever idle resources are detected, the clusters automatically scale in, according to some predefined policies, in order to cut down the costs in the case of using a public Cloud provider. This creates the illusion of a real cluster without requiring an investment beyond the actual usage. Two different case studies are presented to assess the effectiveness of an elastic virtual cluster. The results show that the usage of self-managed elastic clusters represents an important economic saving when compared both to physical clusters and to static virtual clusters deployed on an IaaS Cloud, with a reduced penalty in the elasticity management. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.