Exploiting non-dedicated resources for cloud computing

Popular web services and applications such as Google Apps, DropBox, and Go.Pc introduce a wasteful imbalance of processing resources. Each host operated by a provider serves hundreds to thousands of users, treating their PCs as thin clients. Tapping the processing, storage and networking capacities of these non-dedicated resources promises to reduce the size of required hardware basis significantly. Consequently, it presents a noteworthy opportunity for service providers and operators of cloud computing infrastructures. We investigate how a mixture of dedicated (and so highly available) hosts and non-dedicated (and so highly volatile) hosts can be used to provision a processing tier of a large-scale web service. We discuss an operational model which guarantees long-term availability despite of host churn, and study multiple aspects necessary to implement it. These include: ranking of non-dedicated hosts according to their long-term availability behavior, short-term availability modeling of these hosts, and simulation of migration and group availability levels using real-world availability data from 10,000 non-dedicated hosts. We also study the tradeoff between a larger share of dedicated hosts vs. higher migration rate in terms of costs and SLA objectives. This yields an optimization approach where a service provider can find a suitable balance between costs and service quality. The experimental results show that it is possible to achieve a wide spectrum of such modes, ranging from 3.6 USD/hour to 5 USD/hour for a group of at least 50 hosts available with probability greater than 0.90.