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Papaioannou, KonstantinosAuthor

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November 22, 2024
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Proceedings Paper
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Is Machine Learning Necessary for Cloud Resource Usage Forecasting?

Publicated to: PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2023 ACM SYMPOSIUM ON CLOUD COMPUTING, SOCC 2023. 544-554 - 2023-01-01 (), DOI: 10.1145/3620678.3624790

Authors:

Christofidi, Georgia; Papaioannou, Konstantinos; Doudali, Thaleia Dimitra
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Affiliations

IMDEA Software Inst, Madrid, Spain - Author

Abstract

Robust forecasts of future resource usage in cloud computing environments enable high efficiency in resource management solutions, such as autoscaling and overcommitment policies. Production-level systems use lightweight combinations of historical information to enable practical deployments. Recently, Machine Learning (ML) models, in particular Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks, have been proposed by various works, for their improved predictive capabilities. Following this trend, we train LSTM models and observe high levels of prediction accuracy, even on unseen data. Upon meticulous visual inspection of the results, we notice that although the predicted values seem highly accurate, they are nothing but versions of the original data shifted by one time step into the future. Yet, this clear shift seems to be enough to produce a robust forecast, because the values are highly correlated across time. We investigate time series data of various resource usage metrics (CPU, memory, network, disk I/O) across different cloud providers and levels, such as at the physical or virtual machine-level and at the application job-level. We observe that resource utilization displays very small variations in consecutive time steps. This insight can enable very simple solutions, such as data shifts, to be used for cloud resource forecasting and deliver highly accurate predictions. This is the reason why we ask whether complex machine learning models are even necessary to use. We envision that practical resource management systems need to first identify the extent to which simple solutions can be effective, and resort to using machine learning to the extent that enables its practical use.
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Keywords

Cloud computingData persistenceForecastingLong short term memorMachine learningNetworPersistent forecastPredictionResource usageWorkload

Quality index

Bibliometric impact. Analysis of the contribution and dissemination channel

Independientemente del impacto esperado determinado por el canal de difusión, es importante destacar el impacto real observado de la propia aportación.

Según las diferentes agencias de indexación, el número de citas acumuladas por esta publicación hasta la fecha 2026-04-15:

  • WoS: 4
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Impact and social visibility

From the perspective of influence or social adoption, and based on metrics associated with mentions and interactions provided by agencies specializing in calculating the so-called "Alternative or Social Metrics," we can highlight as of 2026-04-15:

  • The use, from an academic perspective evidenced by the Altmetric agency indicator referring to aggregations made by the personal bibliographic manager Mendeley, gives us a total of: 6.
  • The use of this contribution in bookmarks, code forks, additions to favorite lists for recurrent reading, as well as general views, indicates that someone is using the publication as a basis for their current work. This may be a notable indicator of future more formal and academic citations. This claim is supported by the result of the "Capture" indicator, which yields a total of: 6 (PlumX).

With a more dissemination-oriented intent and targeting more general audiences, we can observe other more global scores such as:

  • The Total Score from Altmetric: 13.
  • The number of mentions on the social network X (formerly Twitter): 1 (Altmetric).
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Awards linked to the item

We thank the reviewers and our shepherd Yiwen Zhu for their constructive feedback. This work is part of the grants FJC2021-047102-I, TED2021-132464B-I00, PID2022-142290OBI00, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, the European Union ''NextGenerationEU''/PRTR and the ESF+.
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