Lean Infrastructure Commitment

Even with aggressive demand management, there will inevitably be cycles of aggregate infrastructure demand that increase and decrease by time of day and day of the week. Clever infrastructure management enables the infrastructure service provider to power off excess equipment as aggregate demand decreases, and then power equipment back on as aggregate demand increases. This chapter explains unit commitment and infrastructure commitment, framing the unit commitment problem, framing the infrastructure commitment problem, understanding element startup time, and understanding element shutdown time. Infrastructure commitment optimization principles can usefully be adapted from the power industry to optimize power management of cloud service providers?> physical infrastructure capacity to achieve the goal of lean cloud computing: sustainably achieve the shortest lead time, best quality and value, highest customer delight at the lowest cost, as well as reducing electricity consumption and hence carbon footprint.