Abstract: Resource provisioning is the main requirement in a cloud environment, where several resources like memory, CPU, storage, etc.… are allocated to the requesting consumer process in such a way that the resources are utilized in an efficient manner and distributed fairly among the requesting processes. Load balancing happens to be a vital task in resource provisioning to ensure fairness in resource allocation. Best-effort applications do not place any constraints on the amount or the quantity of resources allocated and the timing of scheduling. This paper presents a comparative study of several exiting approaches and certain modified versions of the existing approaches for load balancing algorithms for best-effort applications.

Keywords: Cloud Computing, Resource Provisioning, Load Balancing, Fault Tolerance