ESNemble: an Echo State Network-based ensemble for workload prediction and resource allocation of Web applications in the cloud

Workload prediction is an essential prerequisite to allocate resources efficiently and maintain service level agreements in cloud computing environment. However, the best solution for a prediction task may not be a single model due to the challenge of varied characteristics of different systems. Thus, in this work, we propose an ensemble model, namely ESNemble, based on echo state network (ESN) for workload time series forecasting. ESNemble consists of four main steps, including features selection using ESN reservoirs, dimensionality reduction using kernel principal component analysis, features aggregation using matrices concatenation, and regression using least absolute shrinkage and selection operator for final predictions. In addition, necessary hyperparameters for ESNemble are optimized using genetic algorithm. For experimental evaluation, we have used ESNemble to combine five different prediction algorithms on three recent logs extracted from real-world web servers. Through our experimental results, we have shown that ESNemble outperforms all component models in terms of accuracy and resource allocation and presented the running time of our model to show the feasibility of our model in real-world applications.