Autonomic management of cloud service centers with availability guarantees

Modern cloud infrastructures live in an open world, characterized by continuous changes in the environment and in the requirements they have to meet. Continuous changes occur autonomously and unpredictably, and they are out of control of the cloud provider. Therefore, advanced solutions have to be developed able to dynamically adapt the cloud infrastructure, while providing continuous service and performance guarantees. A number of autonomic computing solutions have been developed such that resources are dynamically allocated among running applications on the basis of short-term demand estimates. However, only performance and energy trade-off have been considered so far with a lower emphasis on the infrastructure dependability/availability which has been demonstrated to be the weakest link in the chain for early cloud providers. The aim of this paper is to fill this literature gap devising resource allocation policies for cloud virtualized environments able to identify performance and energy trade-offs, providing a priori availability guarantees for cloud end-users. © 2010 IEEE.