To Build or Not to Build? Addressing the Expansion Strategies of Cloud Providers

With the increasing popularity gained by cloud computing systems, cloud providers are facing rapidly increasing traffic loads, which requires them to have proper expansion strategies for their datacenters. Expanding the capacities of existing datacenters or building new ones requires many factors to be considered such as power resources availability, prices (of power, land, etc.), carbon tax, free cooling options, and renewable energy. In this paper, we address the problem of deciding the best expansion strategy for a given cloud provider by deciding whether it is beneficial for the cloud provider to build new datacenters or to simply expand the datacenters it currently has.