On Potential Risks of “Natural” Hybrid Load Balancing in Large-Scale Clouds: Work in Progress

Realization of economic, reliability, and low latency benefits of the Cloud computing model will probably require flexible hybrid static/dynamic load balancing which combine good queuing performance under stable exogenous conditions with timely response to varying/uncertain exogenous conditions. This paper reports on work in progress on potential risks/benefits of natural two-tier hybrid load balancing strategies. At the “slow” time scale, this strategy employs quasi static load balancing which adjusts to the expected/normal exogenous conditions. Once divergence between the actual and expected exogenous conditions is indicated by grows of the real-time queues, a “natural” dynamic load balancing is employed. Our main, and somewhat unexpected, finding is that while this “natural” hybrid strategy inherits benefits of static load balancing, it also inherits local instability risk of dynamic load balancing.