Abstract: A cloud computing system including a plurality of computing devices configured to host virtual machine instances, each computing device in the plurality of computing devices including a monitor operable to collect metadata about the associated computing device. The system also includes a registry operable to receive and store the metadata from the plurality of computing devices and a scheduler operable to select a host computing device out of the plurality of computing devices on which to instantiate a virtual machine instance based on the metadata stored in the registry.

Abstract: In one embodiment, an elastic, massively parallel processing (MPP) data warehouse leveraging a cloud computing system is disclosed. Queries received via one or more API endpoints are decomposed into parallelizable subqueries and executed across a heterogenous set of demand-instantiable computing units. Available computing units vary in capacity, storage, memory, bandwidth, and hardware; the specific mix of computing units instantiated is determined dynamically according to the specifics of the query. Better performance is obtained by modifying the mix of instantiated computing units according to a machine learning algorithm.