Risk-Aware Limited Lookahead Control for Dynamic Resource Provisioning in Enterprise Computing Systems

Utility or on-demand computing, a provisioning model where a service provider makes computing infrastructure available to customers as needed, is becoming increasingly common in enterprise computing systems. Realizing this model requires making dynamic and sometimes risky, resource provisioning and allocation decisions in an uncertain operating environment to maximize revenue while reducing operating cost. This paper develops an optimization framework wherein the resource provisioning problem is posed as one of sequential decision making under uncertainty and solved using a limited lookahead control scheme. The proposed approach accounts for the switching costs incurred during resource provisioning and explicitly encodes risk in the optimization problem. Simulations using workload traces from the Soccer World Cup 1998 web site show that a computing system managed by our controller generates up to 20% more revenue than a system without dynamic control while incurring low control overhead.