Penalty migration as a performance signaling method in energy-efficient clouds

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The concept of energy efficiency in clouds has gradually evolved and now includes not only traditional CPU and memory utilizations but also network traffic, number of migrations, etc. Recent literature also shows that the most energy efficient migration schedule is one that, in addition to minimizing migration count, also manages to vacate the most physical machines, thus allowing them to be powered down. While it is obvious that such migration schedules depend on frequent changes in VM-to-PM mapping layouts, existing literature does not offer any practical strategies to that effect. This paper retains the basic notion that lowering the number of migrations and powering down PMs contribute to a level of energy efficiency, but also proposes a new notion called penalty migration. In this paper, the Service and the Cloud have an SLA that spells out an effective range of operations for the Service’s applications, which, if the range is exceeded, can be penalized by the Cloud in several ways discussed in this paper. In addition to higher fluidity, the proposed strategies also improve QoS from the viewpoint of the Cloud’s resources as well as individual service populations. In turn, services can benefit from penalty migrations, treating migration events as QoS monitoring data. This proposal is the first known attempt to distribute the task of performance management between cloud and service providers, where penalty migrations are a form of signaling between the two roles.