Researchers at University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia are using artificial intelligence to develop a computer network capable of regulating its own public cloud services consumption, making the elastic cloud computing a reality.
According to research lead Srikumar Venugopal, elasticity is a major benefit of the cloud, enabling firms to automatically and instantly regulate the consumption of cloud computing power as per requirements.
As part of the research, team members developed a software controller integrating a simplified version of reinforcement learning, which is an artificial intelligence system usually associated with robotics than IT.
The researchers said that every virtual server instance in the cloud within the proposed model, would possess its own controller that observed the performance of applications hosted on the server
Under the model, if an application performance becomes critical after a sudden increase in demand, the controller will communicate with others on the network and automatically determine how and where to source extra capacity to cope with the load.
"These controllers are learning together," Venugopal said.
"They’re all doing their own thing but they’re talking to each other and then they’re figuring out which controller has high load and which one has much less load, and how to balance that out."
"In the latest results, we have incorporated much more resilience — such as workarounds if the virtual machines stop talking to each other."
"We’ve also improved the intelligence."
Together with the ongoing study, researchers are also examining the potential to elasticise cloud-hosted databases.
