Analyzing security and energy tradeoffs in autonomic capacity management

Capacity management of a hosting infrastructure has traditionally focused only on performance goals. However, the quality of service provided to the hosted applications, and ultimately the revenues achieved by the provider, depend also on other aspects, such as security and energy constraints. This paper extends our self-adaptive SLA-driven capacity management solution to capture, in an unified framework, key performance and cost tradeoffs that arise when operating under security attacks and energy constraints. A number of scenarios and strategies based on dynamic SLA contracts are designed to help uncover, via simulation experiments, the main tradeoffs, considering both the providerpsilas interests (i.e., revenues) and the customerpsilas interests (i.e., legitimate throughput, response time distribution and costs). Finally, we also assess the cost-effectiveness of our framework under highly variable application service times.