Resource Provisioning Policies to Increase IaaS Provider's Profit in a Federated Cloud Environment

Cloud Federation is a recent paradigm that helps Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers to overcome resource limitation during spikes in demand for Virtual Machines (VMs) by outsourcing requests to other federation members. IaaS providers also have the option of terminating spot VMs, i.e, cheaper VMs that can be canceled to free resources for more profitable VM requests. By both approaches, providers can expect to reject less profitable requests. For IaaS providers, pricing and profit are two important factors, in addition to maintaining a high Quality of Service (QoS) and utilization of their resources to remain in the business. For this, a clear understanding of the usage pattern, types of requests, and infrastructure costs are necessary while making decisions to terminate spot VMs, outsourcing or contributing to the federation. In this paper, we propose policies that help in the decision-making process to increase resources utilization and profit. Simulation results indicate that the proposed policies enhance the profit, utilization, and QoS (smaller number of rejected VM requests) in a Cloud federation environment.

I. Introduction

In recent years, Cloud Computing [1]–[3] has become a consolidated paradigm for delivery of services through on-demand provisioning of virtualized resources. By the emergence of this paradigm, along with support of companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM, the long envisioned dream of computing as a utility finally has come true. Now customers are able to use resources and services in a pay-as-you-go manner from anywhere and at anytime. Among the different methods to deliver Cloud services, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) allows Cloud provider to sell resources in the form of Virtual Machines (VMs) to customers.