Optimal Management of Virtual Infrastructures Under Flexible Cloud Service Agreements
Authors: Guo, Zhiling; Li, Jin; Ramesh, Ram
Journal: Information Systems Research (2019)
<jats:p> Cloud-service agreements entail the provisioning of virtual infrastructures at specified availability levels. The agreements specify the infrastructure prices and penalties borne by providers when assured availabilities are not met. Hence, backup resources should be optimally provisioned by balancing the provisioning costs with penalties. We develop stochastic dynamic optimization models of the backup provisioning problem by integrating methods from Operations Management, Statistics and Machine Learning, and Computer Science. We present two sets of dynamic provisioning strategies: periodic policies where resources are adjusted at regular intervals and aperiodic policies that allow flexible timing of such interventions. A closed-loop optimization model under conservative resource control and a certainty-equivalent optimization model under aggressive resource control are developed for periodic management. Similarly, we propose two strategies for aperiodic management: single intervention with single look-ahead and multiple interventions with single look-ahead. We develop computationally efficient online algorithms for both periodic and aperiodic models. We evaluate the model…