Deep reinforcement learning for multi-objective placement of virtual machines in cloud datacenters

The ubiquitous diffusion of cloud computing requires suitable management policies to face the workload while guaranteeing quality constraints and mitigating costs. The typical trade-off is between the used power and the adherence to a service-level metric subscribed by customers. To this aim, a possible idea is to use an optimization-based placement mechanism to select the servers where to deploy virtual machines. Unfortunately, high packing factors could lead to performance and security issues, e.g., virtual machines can compete for hardware resources or collude to leak data. Therefore, we introduce a multi-objective approach to compute optimal placement strategies considering different goals, such as the impact of hardware outages, the power required by the datacenter, and the performance perceived by users. Placement strategies are found by using a deep reinforcement learning framework to select the best placement heuristic for each virtual machine composing the workload. Results indicate that our method outperforms bin packing heuristics widely used in the literature when considering either synthetic or real workloads.