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Effective Capacity Modulation as an Explicit Control Knob for Public Cloud Profitability

Published:21 May 2018Publication History
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Abstract

In this article, we explore the efficacy of dynamic effective capacity modulation (i.e., using virtualization techniques to offer lower resource capacity than that advertised by the cloud provider) as a control knob for a cloud provider’s profit maximization complementing the more well-studied approach of dynamic pricing. In particular, our focus is on emerging cloud ecosystems wherein we expect tenants to modify their demands strategically in response to such modulation in effective capacity and prices. Toward this, we consider a simple model of a cloud provider that offers a single type of virtual machine to its tenants and devise a leader/follower game-based cloud control framework to capture the interactions between the provider and its tenants. We assume both parties employ myopic control and short-term predictions to reflect their operation under the high dynamism and poor predictability in such environments. Our evaluation using a combination of real data center traces and real-world benchmarks hosted on a prototype OpenStack-based cloud shows 10% to 30% profit improvement for a cloud provider compared with baselines that use static pricing and/or static effective capacity.

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  • Published in

    cover image ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems
    ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems  Volume 13, Issue 1
    March 2018
    184 pages
    ISSN:1556-4665
    EISSN:1556-4703
    DOI:10.1145/3208359
    Issue’s Table of Contents

    Copyright © 2018 ACM

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    • Published: 21 May 2018
    • Accepted: 1 August 2017
    • Revised: 1 July 2017
    • Received: 1 December 2016
    Published in taas Volume 13, Issue 1

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