A Cloud Controller for Performance-Based Pricing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cloud controller that dynamically adjusts CPU frequencies based on performance-based pricing to optimize energy savings while minimizing revenue loss, demonstrating up to 32% energy cost reduction.

Contribution

It proposes a novel performance-based pricing model for VMs with different CPU-boundedness and a cloud controller that balances energy savings against revenue loss.

Findings

Energy cost savings up to 32% in simulations

Controller effectively balances energy and revenue trade-offs

Performance-based pricing adapts to VM CPU-boundedness

Abstract

New dynamic cloud pricing options are emerging with cloud providers offering resources as a wide range of CPU frequencies and matching prices that can be switched at runtime. On the other hand, cloud providers are facing the problem of growing operational energy costs. This raises a trade-off problem between energy savings and revenue loss when performing actions such as CPU frequency scaling. Although existing cloud con- trollers for managing cloud resources deploy frequency scaling, they only consider fixed virtual machine (VM) pricing. In this paper we propose a performance-based pricing model adapted for VMs with different CPU-boundedness properties. We present a cloud controller that scales CPU frequencies to achieve energy cost savings that exceed service revenue losses. We evaluate the approach in a simulation based on real VM workload, electricity price and temperature traces, estimating energy cost savings up to 32% in certain scenarios.