NFRA: Generalized Network Flow-Based Resource Allocation for Hosting Centers

Due to prohibitive cost of data center setup and maintenance, many small-scale businesses rely on hosting centers to provide the cloud infrastructure to run their workloads. Hosting centers host services of the clients on their behalf and guarantee quality of service as defined by service level agreements (SLAs.) To reduce energy consumption and to maximize profit it is critical to optimally allocate resources to meet client SLAs. Optimal allocation is a nontrivial task due to 1) resource heterogeneity where energy consumption of a client task varies depending on the allocated resources 2) lack of energy proportionality where energy cost for a task varies based on server utilization. In this paper, we introduce a generalized Network Flow-based Resource Allocation framework, called NFRA, for energy minimization and profit maximization. NFRA provides a unified framework to model profit maximization under a wide range of SLAs. We will demonstrate the simplicity of this unified framework by deriving optimal resource allocations for three different SLAs. We derive workload demands and server energy consumption data from SPECWeb2009 benchmark results to demonstrate the efficiency of NFRA framework.