Power and Performance Management in Cloud Computing Systems

To Lorenza, my forever love... Cloud computing is an emerging computing paradigm which is gaining popularity in IT industry for its appealing property of considering “Everything as a Service”. The goal of a cloud infrastructure provider is to maximize its profit by minimizing the amount of violations of Quality-of-Service (QoS) levels agreed with service providers, and, at the same time, by lowering infrastructure costs. Among these costs, the energy consumption induced by the cloud infrastructure, for running cloud services, plays a primary role. Unfortunately, the minimization of QoS viola-tions and, at the same time, the reduction of energy consumption is a conflicting and challenging problem. In this thesis, we propose a framework to automatically manage computing resources of cloud infrastructures in order to simultaneously achieve suitable QoS levels and to reduce as much as possible the amount of energy used for providing services. We show, through simulation, that our approach is able to dynamically adapt to time-varying workloads (without any prior knowledge