clouds are opaque to the infrastructure level, such
APIs are essential to make application information
available for the IaaS resource allocation and manage-
ment mechanisms. Consequently, such APIs should
allow PaaS managers to ask the IaaS provider to flag
the activity of specific VMs or groups of VMs as
CPU-, IO- or memory-intensive, to predict workload
peaks or to provide hints regarding the execution time
of groups of VMs that belong to the same job.
Such an API-driven approach to cross-layer co-
operation achieves several benefits. First, each cloud
provider may choose to implement only the required
plugins according to the amount of information it
intends to share. While private clouds may imple-
ment the whole set of energy-related and coopera-
tion APIs, public providers may decide to share only
non-sensitive data. Furthermore, an abstraction layer
such as Libcloud fosters interoperability and porta-
bility between clouds, such that PaaS providers can
make data available and collect infrastructure infor-
mation according to predefined formats, while each
IaaS cloud can provide its own interface implementa-
tion according to its internal structure and APIs.
6 CONCLUSION
The growing demand for “green” and energy-efficient
data centers is a key driver in the design of cloud
computing frameworks, which target not only perfor-
mance, but also cost efficiency. In particular, design-
ing virtualized environments for energy efficiency has
led to a wide spectrum of optimization techniques,
most of which are intended for IaaS cloud offerings.
Whereas higher-level PaaS services hold key infor-
mation related to workload properties and execution,
they do not have direct control over the resource-
management mechanisms that could trigger energy
gains. In this work, we argue that there is a need
for coordinated actions between IaaS and PaaS cloud
layers. We believe that the conventional boundaries
of the cloud stack layers can be extended to promote
energy-awareness at higher levels, while enhancing
low-level resource managers with detailed workload
profiles to achieve fine-grained energy saving mecha-
nisms.
We investigated a set of opportunities for both
IaaS and PaaS providers to address these objectives
and highlighted the tradeoffs of cross-layer informa-
tion passing. As future work, our goal is to design the
proposed API suite by extending Libcloud, in order to
enable cross-layer cooperation between open-source
IaaS and PaaS cloud implementations and to develop
prototypes of cooperating cloud frameworks.
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