Cost-Aware Resource Management for Federated Clouds Using Resource Sharing Contracts

Cloud computing and its pay-as-you-go model continue to provide significant cost benefits and a seamless service delivery model for cloud consumers. The evolution of small-scale and large-scale geo-distributed datacenters operated and managed by individual cloud service providers raises new challenges in terms of effective global resource sharing and management of autonomously-controlled individual datacenter resources. Earlier solutions for geo-distributed clouds have focused primarily on achieving global efficiency in resource sharing that results in significant inefficiencies in local resource allocation for individual datacenters leading to unfairness in revenue and profit earned. In this paper, we propose a new contracts-based resource sharing model for federated geo-distributed clouds that allows cloud service providers to establish resource sharing contracts with individual datacenters apriori for defined time intervals during a 24 hour time period. Based on the established contracts, individual cloud service providers employ a cost-aware job scheduling and provisioning algorithm that enables tasks to complete and meet their response time requirements. The proposed techniques are evaluated through extensive experiments using realistic workloads and the results demonstrate the effectiveness, scalability and resource sharing efficiency of the proposed model.