Hybrid clouds brokering: business opportunities, QoS and energy-saving issues

Hybrid Clouds couple the scalability offered by public Clouds with the greater control supplied by private ones. A (hybrid) Cloud broker acting as an intermediary between users and providers of public Cloud services, may support customers in the selection of the most suitable offers, optionally adding the provisioning of dedicated services with higher levels of quality. The paper presents a Cloud brokering algorithm delivering services with different level of non-functional requirements, to the private or public resources, on the basis of different scheduling criteria. With the objective of maximize user satisfaction and broker's revenues, the algorithm pursues profit increases by reducing energy costs, through the adoption of energy saving mechanisms. A simulation model is used to evaluate performance in terms of broker's revenue, user satisfaction and energy behavior of various allocation policies. Simulation results show that differences among policies depend on system loads and that the use of turn on and off techniques greatly improves energy savings at low and medium load rates.