SLA-Based Profit Optimization in Cloud Bursting PaaS

PaaS (Platform as a Service) is an increasingly popular cloud model, providing a complete development and hosting environment for cloud applications. As the use of PaaS becomes pervasive, defining and maintaining SLAs (Service Level Agreements) between PaaS customers and providers becomes essential. Useful SLAs should provide guarantees on application quality properties (e.g., response time) rather than on resource availability (e.g., number of virtual machines). Current PaaS offerings either provide no support for providing such guarantees or provide support targeting a restricted set of application types. In this paper, we present an SLA-driven PaaS architecture, called Meryn, which supports cloud bursting and is designed to be easily extensible to host new application types. We propose a decentralized optimization policy aiming at maximizing the PaaS provider profit and taking into account the payment of penalties incurred when quality guarantees are unsatisfied. In addition, we apply the proposed optimization policy to batch and MapReduce applications. We implemented and evaluated our policy through a series of simulations on the Grid5000 test bed. The results show that our approach provides up to 14.77% more profit for the provider and uses up to 80.99% less public clouds resources compared with a basic approach.