On satisfying green SLAs in distributed clouds

Abstract

With the massive adoption of cloud-based services, high energy consumption and carbon footprint of cloud infrastructures have become a major concern in IT industry. Consequently, many governments and IT advisory organizations have urged IT stakeholders (i.e., cloud provider and cloud customers) to embrace green IT and regularly monitor and report their carbon emissions and put in place efficient strategies and techniques to control the environmental impact of their infrastructures and/or applications. Motivated by this growing trend, we investigate, in this paper, how cloud providers can meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with green requirements. In such SLAs, a cloud customer requires from cloud providers that carbon emissions generated by the leased resources should not exceed a fixed bound. We hence propose a resource management framework allowing cloud providers to provision resources in the form of Virtual Data Centers (VDCs) (i.e., a set of virtual machines and virtual links with guaranteed bandwidth) across a geo-distributed infrastructure with the aim of reducing operational costs and green SLA violation penalties. Extensive simulations show that the proposed solution maximizes the cloud provider's profit and minimizes the violation of green SLAs.