Cloud research to date has lacked data on the characteristics of the production virtual
machine (VM) workloads of large cloud providers. A thorough understanding of these
characteristics can inform the providers' resource management systems, eg VM scheduler,
power manager, server health manager. In this paper, we first introduce an extensive
characterization of Microsoft Azure's VM workload, including distributions of the VMs'
lifetime, deployment size, and resource consumption. We then show that certain VM …

… We can address these challenges by deeply understanding and predicting the
characteristics of the VM workload! … VM type (IaaS vs PaaS) VM memory size VM
deployment size VM arrivals VM workload class (interactive vs delay-insensitive)
Correlations between characteristics Other VM workload characteristics …