Abstract
Cloud Computing paradigm has been a trend in the computational world. Thus, many service providers today are competing to enhance their features and attract more customers as they are offering them a bunch of services through a pay-as-you-go pricing model. However, despite their huge fame, cloud environments still suffer from some issues that are being studied by researchers from various perspectives. One of the controversial cloud issues nowadays is interference among virtual machines (VMs) sharing the same hardware platform called also physical machine (PM). This problem occurs due to contention on shared resources between co-hosted VMs which results in performance degradation. Resource contention happens when demand for shared resources exceeds the supply due to VMs co-hosting. The co-hosting of VMs on the same PM, emerges from the ambition of server consolidation that cloud providers aim to reach in order to improve power efficiency and optimize resource utilization. Therefore, the key factor of successful server consolidation is to minimize performance interference among co-located VMs. In this paper, we are going to reveal the interference issue as well as its major cause, survey existing researchers' visions to detect and/or predict such issue and exhibit a comparative study between them. Then we will reveal some challenging points that require further consideration. Our comparative study may be helpful for people aiming to be involved in cloud environments research field, as it gathers different existing approaches dealing with performance interference detection and prediction in cloud environments.