Improving the Efficiency of Cloud Infrastructures with Elastic Tandem Machines

In this paper, we propose a concept for improving the energy efficiency and resource utilization of cloud infrastructures by combining the benefits of heterogeneous machine instances. The basic idea is to integrate low-power system on a chip (SoC) machines and high-power virtual machine instances into so-called Elastic Tandem Machine Instances (ETMI). The low-power machine serves low load and is always running to ensure the availability of the ETMI. When load rises, the ETMI scales up automatically by starting the high-power instance and handing over traffic to it. For the non-disruptive transition from low-power to high-power machines and vice versa, we present a handover mechanism based on software-defined networking technologies. Our evaluations show the applicability of low-power SoC machines to serve low load efficiently as well as the desired scalability properties of ETMIs.