Sustainable Technical Debt-Aware Computing Model for Virtual Machine Migration (TD4VM) in IaaS Cloud

Abstract

In the cloud, optimal CPU and memory utilization can lead to low energy consumption, which is an important aspect of green computing. However, constantly changing workloads may contribute to resource over- or underutilization. The former violates the service level agreement’s quality of service constraints. The latter indicates that as workload decreases, virtual machine resource utilization decreases. They introduce difficult decision-making tasks when dynamically adapting (e.g., migrating) a virtual machine in order to maximize its resource utilization over time. To address these challenges, we propose a newer mathematical model called the technical debt-aware computing model for virtual machine migration (TD4VM). The model promotes a holistic approach to dynamic virtual machine adaptation for cloud service providers and addresses existing issues regarding logical aspects of virtual machine adaptation in a highly dynamic cloud environment, which includes a measurement mechanism and estimation guidelines for estimating future debt and utility. Technical debt-aware models make decisions based on VM operating costs, quality, minimizing SLA violations, and incurring technical debt. This approach connects decisions about virtual machine migration that affect overall utility over time. Our method can determine whether a virtual machine should be moved when it is over or underutilized based on its technical debt. The experimental results on a dataset obtained from the Materna-trace-1 demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on a variety of performance metrics. A numerical comparison shows that TD4VM outperforms the other approaches, with VM resource economies of 171.84%, 91.33%, 97.85%, and 93.89% for TD4VM, LRMMT, IQRMC, and IQRMMT, respectively. Additionally, we quantify the debt amassed using TD4VM and state-of-the-art techniques. When compared to LRMMT, IQRMC, and IQRMMT, which cost (in $) 0.77, 0.73, and 0.76, respectively, TD4VM accumulates the minimum debt of 0.17.