Mistral: Dynamically Managing Power, Performance, and Adaptation Cost in Cloud Infrastructures

Server consolidation based on virtualization is an important technique for improving power efficiency and resource utilization in cloud infrastructures. However, to ensure satisfactory performance on shared resources under changing application workloads, dynamic management of the resource pool via online adaptation is critical. The inherent tradeoffs between power and performance as well as between the cost of an adaptation and its benefits make such management challenging. In this paper, we present Mistral, a holistic controller framework that optimizes power consumption, performance benefits, and the transient costs incurred by various adaptations and the controller itself to maximize overall utility. Mistral can handle multiple distributed applications and large-scale infrastructures through a multi-level adaptation hierarchy and scalable optimization algorithm. We show that our approach outstrips other strategies that address the tradeoff between only two of the objectives (power, performance, and transient costs).