Abstract Cloud computing is the on‐demand provision of computing resources over the Internet, such as cloud storage, computing power, network, and so on. Cloud computing has several advantages, including high speed, cost reduction, data security, and scalability. The main challenge in cloud environment is to balance the workloads and network traffic among the available resources to achieve maximum performance. Several methods have been proposed in the literature for effective load balancing, including heuristic, meta‐heuristic, and hybrid algorithms. The performance of these techniques has been improved by combining machine learning based Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques and meta‐heuristic algorithms. Most of the existing load balancing techniques are not aware of the content type of user tasks. However, from the literature, the content type of the tasks can be very effective to design a balanced workload distribution system in the cloud. In this work, a novel AI‐assisted hybrid approach called Content‐aware Machine Learning based Load Balancing Scheduler (CA‐MLBS) is proposed. The scheduling system CA‐MLBS combines machine learning and meta‐heuristic algorithms to perform classification based on file type. To achieve this, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) based classifier is used to classify user tasks into different content types such as video, audio, image, and text. A metaheuristic algorithm based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is used to map users' tasks in the cloud. The proposed approach was implemented and evaluated using a renowned Cloudsim simulation kit and compared with Ant Colony Optimization File Type Format (ACOFTF) and Data Files Type Formatting (DFTF) heuristics. The results of the proposed study show that the proposed CA‐MLBS technique achieved improvements of up to 29%, 29%, and 44% in terms of makespan, response time, and throughput, respectively.

Recently, cloud computing has emerged as a primary enabling technology to provide compute, storage, platform, and analytics services to end-users and organizations based on pay-as-you-use. In essence, cloud provides agility, availability, scalability, and resiliency. However, increased number of users leads to issues such as scheduling of requests, demands, and work-load efficiency over the available cloud resources. Similarly, since the inception of cloud computing, task scheduling is reckoned as an essential ingredient in the commercial value of this technology. Task scheduling is considered as an NP-hard problem in cloud computing and different solutions exist in the literature to address this issue. In this paper, we investigate and empirically compare some of the recent state-of-the-art scheduling mechanisms in cloud computing with respect to Makespan (the time difference between the start and finish of a sequence of jobs or tasks) and throughput (number of tasks successfully executed per unit time (Makespan)). We then extend the comparison by evaluating the considered approaches with respect to Average Resource Utilization Ratio (ARUR). We also recommend and identify factors that can improve resource utilization and maximize revenue-generation for cloud service providers.