On Arbitrating the Power-Performance Tradeoff in SaaS Clouds

In this paper, we present an analytical framework for characterizing and optimizing the power-performance tradeoff in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud platforms. Our objectives are two-folded: 1) We maximize the operating revenue when serving heterogeneous SaaS applications with unpredictable user requests. 2) We minimize the power consumption when processing the user requests. To achieve these objectives, we construct a unified profit-maximizing objective to jointly consider revenue and cost in an economic view. An offline solution to maximize the supreme bound of the objective is first developed, to 1) justify the validity of our theoretical model, and 2) establish a benchmark to examine the effectiveness of other control solutions. As a highlight of our contributions, we take advantage of the Lyapunov optimization techniques to design and analyze an optimal yet practical control framework, which makes online decisions on request admission control, routing, and virtual machine (VMs) scheduling. Our control framework can accommodate a variety of design choices and operational requirements in a datacenter. Specifically, buffering facilities can be introduced to alleviate the bursty admitted requests and to improve the robustness of the system, and a power budget can be enforced to improve the datacenter performance (dollar) per watt. Our mathematical analyses and simulations have demonstrated both the optimality (in terms of the cost-effective power-performance tradeoff) and stability (in terms of robustness and adaptivity to time-varying and bursty user requests) achieved by our proposed control framework.