Includes bibliography and index

Cloud computing offers subscription-based on-demand services, and it has emerged as the backbone of the computing industry. It has enabled us to share resources among multiple users through virtualization, which creates a virtual instance of a computer system running in an abstracted hardware layer. Unlike early distributed computing models, it offers virtually limitless computing resources through its large scale cloud data centers. It has gained wide popularity over the past few years, with an ever-increasing infrastructure, a number of users, and the amount of hosted data. The large and complex workloads hosted on these data centers introduce many challenges, including resource utilization, power consumption, scalability, and operational cost. Therefore, an effective resource management scheme is essential to achieve operational efficiency with improved elasticity. Machine learning enabled solutions are the best fit to address these issues as they can analyze and learn from the data. Moreover, it brings automation to the solutions, which is an essential factor in dealing with large distributed systems in the cloud paradigm.