Coach: Exploiting Temporal Patterns for All-Resource Oversubscription in Cloud Platforms

Cloud platforms remain underutilized despite multiple proposals to improve their utilization (e.g., disaggregation, harvesting, and oversubscription). Our characterization of the resource utilization of virtual machines (VMs) in Azure reveals that, while CPU is the main underutilized resource, we need to provide a solution to manage all resources holistically. We also observe that many VMs exhibit complementary temporal patterns, which can be leveraged to improve the oversubscription of underutilized resources.

Based on these insights, we propose Coach: a system that exploits temporal patterns for all-resource oversubscription in cloud platforms. Coach uses long-term predictions and an efficient VM scheduling policy to exploit temporally complementary patterns. We introduce a new general-purpose VM type, called CoachVM, where we partition each resource * Benjamin Reidys and Haoran Ma interned at Microsoft. Stanko Novaković and Lisa Hsu were at Microsoft when they contributed to this work.