FFMRA: A fully fair multi-resource allocation algorithm in cloud environments

The need for effective and fair resource allocation in cloud computing has been identified in the literature and in industrial contexts for a while. Cloud computing seen as a promising technology, offers usage-based payment, scalable and on-demand computing resources. However, during the past decade, the growing complexity of the IT world has resulted in making Quality of Service (QoS) in the cloud a challenging subject and an NP-hard problem. Specifically, the fair allocation of resources in the cloud becomes particularly interesting when many users submit several tasks which require multiple resources. Research in this area has been increasing since 2012 by introducing the Dominant Resource Fairness (DRF) algorithm as an initial attempt to solve the fair resource allocation problem in the cloud. Although DRF meets a sort of desirable fairness properties, it has been proven to be inefficient in certain conditions. Noticeably, DRF and other works in its extension are not intuitively fair after all. Those implementations have been unable to utilize all the resources in the system, leaving the system in an imbalanced situation with respect to each specific system resource. In order to address those issues, we propose in this paper a novel algorithm namely a Fully Fair Multi-Resource Allocation Algorithm in Cloud Environments (FFMRA) which allocates resources in a fully fair way considering both dominant and non-dominant shares. The results from the experiments conducted in CloudSim show that FFMRA provides approximately 100% recourse utilization, and distributing them fairly among the users while meeting desirable fairness features.