Items by Allman, Mark

Web hosting providers are increasingly looking into dynamic hosting to reduce costs and improve the performance of their platforms. Instead of provisioning fixed resources to each customer, dynamic hosting maintains a variable number of application instances to satisfy current demand. While existing research in this area has mostly focused on the algorithms that decide on the number and location of application instances, we address the problem of efficient enactment of these decisions once they are made. We propose a new approach to application placement and experimentally show that it dramatically reduces the cost of application placement, which in turn improves the end-to-end agility of the hosting platform in reacting to demand changes.