Exploiting VM migration for the automated power and performance management of green cloud computing systems

Cloud computing is an emerging computing paradigm in which "Everything is as a Service", including the provision of virtualized computing infrastructures (known as Infrastructure-as-a-Service modality) hosted on the physical infrastructure, owned by an infrastructure provider. The goal of this infrastructure provider is to maximize its profit by minimizing the amount of violations of Quality-of-Service (QoS) levels agreed with its customers and, at the same time, by lowering infrastructure costs among which energy consumption plays a major role. In this paper, we propose a framework able to automatically manage resources of cloud infrastructures in order to simultaneously achieve suitable QoS levels and to reduce as much as possible the amount of energy used for providing services. We show, through simulation, that our approach is able to dynamically adapt to time-varying workloads (without any prior knowledge) and to significantly reduce QoS violations and energy consumption with respect to traditional static approaches.