  Cloud computing can offer a set of computing resources according to users'
demand. It is suitable to be used to handle flash-crowd events in Web
applications due to its elasticity and on-demand characteristics. Thus, when
Web applications need more computing or storage capacity, they just instantiate
new resources. However, providers have to estimate the amount of resources to
instantiate to handle with the flash-crowd event. This estimation is far from
trivial since each cloud environment provides several kinds of heterogeneous
resources, each one with its own characteristics such as bandwidth, CPU, memory
and financial cost. In this paper, the Flash Crowd Handling Problem (FCHP) is
precisely defined and formulated as an integer programming problem. A new
algorithm for handling with a flash crowd named FCHP-ILS is also proposed. With
FCHP-ILS the Web applications can replicate contents in the already
instantiated resources and define the types and amount of resources to
instantiate in the cloud during a flash crowd. Our approach is evaluated
considering real flash crowd traces obtained from the related literature. We
also present a case study, based on a synthetic dataset representing
flash-crowd events in small scenarios aiming at the comparison of the proposed
approach against Amazon's Auto-Scale mechanism.

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing