A Technical Study at UOB Suggests

A Technical Study
at UOB Suggests

A Framework to
Reduce the Issues of Renting Surplus Resources

19 November 2020

A technical study at the University of Bahrain (UOB)
proposed a framework to reduce the issued associated with the process of
renting surplus resources and exploiting the reduced prices provided by cloud
computing services by monitoring the changing prices in a lot of the markets of
service providers.

Student Ali Jassim Sanad presented his study as a
requirement to obtain a master’s degree in the Information Technology Master’s
Program at the College of Information Technology, entitled “Reducing the costs
of providing cloud services by using redundant resources and moving between
them.”

The results of the study showed a reduction in the cost of
rent at a rate ranging between 64% to 74% in comparison with the resources
rental prices from currently used methods.

The study was discussed on Wednesday (11 November 2020) and
it tested a number of artificial intelligence algorithms to verify the
predictability of prices subject to change based on the supply and demand
process. The results showed that the predicted prices were close to real
prices, which indicates the possibility of using such algorithms for this type
of price prediction process and contributes to taking proactive measures to
reduce the risks associated with the process of renting surplus resources.

Also, the study showed that cloud computing offers a set of
benefits, including reducing usage costs, which is one of the most important
benefits that encourage users to take advantage of cloud computing. The
reduction in the usage cost comes from the process of renting the necessary
resources instead of buying them, and in return, companies providing cloud
services to configure and maintain multiple service centers that contain the
resources that are leased to users. In order to reduce the operational cost of
these centers, the companies providing cloud services rent unused resources at
reduced costs, with the ability to retrieve these resources from users when
they are needed. This type of leasing is called the leasing spot and it’s one
of the methods that provides an additional reduction for users, however, it has
several issues that reduce its availability and dependence, including the issue
of continuous change in resource prices depending on the supply and demand
processes.

The researcher verified the validity of the proposed
framework by performing a simulation using real information from the Amazon
Internet Services Company.

It’s worth mentioning that the discussion was held over the
Microsoft Teams platform and the discussion committee consisted of the
Associate Professor Dr. Mohammed Al-Nabhan from the University of Mu’tah in the
Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan as an external examiner, Associate Professor Dr.
Alauddin Yousef Al-Omari at UOB as an internal examiner, and Associate
Professor Dr. Mustafa Muhammad Hammad at UOB as a supervisor.

Sustainable Development Goals:

4 Quality education.

7 Affordable and clean energy

9 Industry, innovation and infrastructure

Key Words:

Cloud Computing, Master’s in Information Technology,
Artificial Intelligence Algorithms, Risk Reduction