Watcher

Watcher

Watcher is an OpenStack module that takes advantage of CEP and ML algorithms/metaheuristics to improve physical resources usage through VM placement improvement. This page is currently a work in progress.

Motivation

The aim of cloud providers is to maximize the utilization of their data-centers by efficiently executing their customer applications with a minimal cost.

From their perspective, the following metrics are necessary to compare optimization strategies:

• the cost reduction
  • number of hosts utilized (storage servers, compute servers, network controllers, ...)
  • energy consumption
  • maintenance & monitoring costs
  • licensing cost
• the generated revenue. If possible, manage overcommitment with a minimum number of SLA violations and induced penalties.

The watcher module offers an open and evolutive optimization solution for helping cloud providers to better satisfy those objectives on an Openstack cluster.

Architecture

Watcher has been designed to use the same modules and architecture of other OpenStack components, such as:

• oslo.db
• oslo.config
• pecan
• WSME
• stevedore

More detailed architecture info can be found here.