  With the rise in data centre virtualization, there are increasing choices as
to where to place workloads, be it in web applications, Enterprise IT or in
Network Function Virtualisation. Workload placement approaches available today
primarily focus on optimising the use of data centre resources. Given the
significant forecasts for network traffic growth to/from data centres,
effective management of both data centre resources and of the wide area
networks resources that provide access to those data centres will become
increasingly important. In this paper, we present an architecture for workload
placement, which uniquely employs a logically centralised controller that is
both network and data centre aware, which aims to place workloads to optimise
the use of both data centre and wide area network resources. We call this
approach workload engineering. We present the results of a simulation study,
where we use a reinforcement-learning based placement algorithm on the
controller. Results of the study show this algorithm was able to place
workloads to make more efficient use of network and data centre resources and
placed ~5-8% more workloads than other heuristic placement algorithms
considered, for the same installed capacity.
