  Elastic autoscaling is the fundamental mechanism that enables the cloud-based
services to continually evolve themselves - through changing the related
software configurations and hardware resource provisions - under time-varying
workloads. However, given the increasingly complex dynamic, uncertainty and
trade-offs related to the runtime QoS and cost/energy of services, cloud
autoscaling system is becoming one of the most complex artifacts constructed by
human and thus its effectiveness is difficult to be preserved. In this article,
we present novel ideas for facilitating cloud autoscaling. Our hypothesis that
cloud ecosystem, represented by a collection of cloud-based services, bears
many similarities with the natural ecosystem. As such, we in- tend to
investigate how ecological view can be adopted to better explain how the
cloud-based services evolve, and to explore what are the key factors that drive
stable and sustainable cloud-based services in the cloud. To achieve this goal,
we aim to transpose ecological principles, theories and models into cloud
autoscaling analogues and spontaneously improve long-term stability and
sustainability of cloud ecosystem.
