Towards pricing-aware consolidation methods for cloud datacenters

Abstract

Cloud Computing has become the major candidate for commercial and academic compute infrastructures. Its virtualized solutions enable efficient, high-rate exploitation of computational and storage resources due to recent advances in data centre consolidation. Resources leased from these providers are offered under many pricing schemes which are often times influenced by the utilised consolidation techniques. In this paper, we provide a foundation to understand the inter-relationship of pricing and consolidation. This has a potential to reach additional gains for the providers from a new angle. To this end we discuss the introduction of a pricing oriented extension of the DISSECT-CF cloud simulator, and introduce a simple consolidation framework that allows easy experimentation with combined pricing and consolidation approaches. Using our generic extensions, we show several simple but easy to combine pricing strategies. Finally, we analyse the impact of consolidators on the profitability of providers applying our simple schemes with the help of real world workload traces.