Two-Level Cooperation in Autonomic Cloud Resource Management

Virtualized cloud infrastructures are becoming very popular as they allow separation of hardware and software management. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the model providing many advantages to both provider and customer. Minimizing the number of resource (and power consumption) in use is one of the main services that such an cloud model must ensure. This objective can be done either by the customer at the application level (by dynamically sizing the application based on the workload) or by the provider at the virtualization level (by consolidating virtual machines based on the infrastructure's utilization rate). Many research works investigate resource management policies separately at the application level or at the virtualized level. In this paper, we study different strategies for cloud resource management: virtual machine consolidation only, dynamic application sizing only, both policy at the same time (either independent or cooperative). We show that virtual machine consolidation and dynamic application sizing do not fully bring benefits to the cloud provider and customer when being implemented without cooperation. Finally, we propose a cooperative model to improve the efficiency of these strategies, in reducing power consumption and keeping application's Quality of Service.