Energy-Aware Cloud Management through Progressive SLA Specification

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel SLA framework enabling energy-aware cloud management by offering VMs with variable availability and prices, leading to significant energy savings and improved customer conversion.

Contribution

It proposes a new SLA specification method that allows flexible energy-aware VM management based on dynamic electricity prices and temperatures, with an optimal SLA determination approach.

Findings

39% average energy savings per VM

Higher customer conversion rates

Effective SLA-based energy management simulation results

Abstract

Novel energy-aware cloud management methods dynamically reallocate computation across geographically distributed data centers to leverage regional electricity price and temperature differences. As a result, a managed VM may suffer occasional downtimes. Current cloud providers only offer high availability VMs, without enough flexibility to apply such energy-aware management. In this paper we show how to analyse past traces of dynamic cloud management actions based on electricity prices and temperatures to estimate VM availability and price values. We propose a novel SLA specification approach for offering VMs with different availability and price values guaranteed over multiple SLAs to enable flexible energy-aware cloud management. We determine the optimal number of such SLAs as well as their availability and price guaranteed values. We evaluate our approach in a user SLA selection simulation using Wikipedia and Grid'5000 workloads. The results show higher customer conversion and 39% average energy savings per VM.