A SLA-Based Resource Donation Mechanism for Service Hosting Utility Center

摘要

The increasing cost of owning and managing IT systems is leading to outsourcing commercial online services to service hosting utility centers by means of service level agreements (SLAs). Low resource utilization and partial service overload are two main issues in utility centers operation. The paper describes a SLA-based fine-grained resource donation mechanism to encourage applications to share under-utilized server resources. Donated resources can be dynamically borrowed by overloaded applications to relieve transient workload surge. Two donation strategies are presented to compensate the "donors" based on their quantified contribution. Compared with resource stealing, the proposed mechanism has advantages in two-fold. First, it's an incentive-compatible one in that both donor applications and utility centers can benefit from resource donation. Secondly, the donors can manifestly specify donation constraints in SLAs to reflect both QoS requirements and resource consumption patterns, which can help improve reliability of resource sharing.