Maximizing Cloud Providers' Revenues via Energy Aware Allocation Policies

Cloud providers, like Amazon, offer their data centers' computational and storage capacities for lease to paying customers. High electricity consumption, associated with running a data center, not only reflects on its carbon footprint, but also increases the costs of running the data center itself. This paper addresses the problem of maximizing the revenues of Cloud providers by trimming down their electricity costs. As a solution allocation policies which are based on the dynamic powering servers on and off are introduced and evaluated. The policies aim at satisfying the conflicting goals of maximizing the users' experience while minimizing the amount of consumed electricity. The results of numerical experiments and simulations are described, showing that the proposed scheme performs well under different traffic conditions.