A Tree-Based Protocol for Enforcing Quotas in Clouds

Services are increasingly being hosted on cloud nodes to enhance their performance and increase their availability. The virtually unlimited availability of cloud resources enables service owners to consume resources without quantitative restrictions, paying only for what they use. To avoid cost overruns, resource consumption must be controlled and capped when necessary. We present a distributed tree-based protocol for managing quotas in clouds that minimizes communication overheads and reduces the time required to determine whether a quota has been exhausted. Experimental evaluation shows that our protocol reduces communication costs by 42% relative to a distributed baseline solution and is up to 15 times faster.