A User Profile-Aware Policy-Based Management Framework for Greening the Cloud

Cloud computing technology is gaining great popularity due to the utility-oriented information services that it offers worldwide. The pay-as-you-go elasticity of cloud computing technology allows hosting pervasive applications and this has become possible for various end-users such as consumers, and those in the scientific and business domains. Although cloud technology returns great benefits and offers numerous advantages, data centers consume significant amounts of electricity to operate hence they require high operational costs and cause harmful impact to the environment such as significant carbon footprints and emissions. In this paper, we propose a User Profile-Aware Policy Switching (UPAPS) management framework to exploit and differentiate user profiles so as to achieve better power efficiency and optimized resource management while still guarantying the quality of service of their cloud services. The proposed UPAPS framework enables more flexibility in resource management. The simulation results have shown significant improvements on the cloud infrastructure in terms of power efficiency and resource management while fulfilling the satisfaction of the users in terms of service quality and cost by using the proposed UPAPS framework. In addition, the proposed framework has proved abilities in effectively managing a group of heuristic algorithms for virtual machine allocation by employing new architectural components such as an User Profile-Aware Policy Switching (UPAPS) unit and an User Service Profile (USP) unit with consideration to both customer requirements and energy efficiency on the cloud service provider perspective.