Leveraging Smart-Meters for Initiating Application Migration across Clouds for Performance and Power-Expenditure Trade-Offs

Smart meters, introduced by smart grid technologies, enable power distribution companies to price electricity differently for different times of the day. Such dynamic pricing schemes help the power companies to modulate the aggregate demand of electricity based on the supply. Accordingly, cloud providers, which are often the largest consumers of electricity, should be able to respond to various dynamic pricing signals called demand response (DR) signals by autonomously moving identified applications to other cloud sites. This paper leverages the recent advancements in cloud migration technologies to 'intelligently' move applications across geographically distributed cloud sites at runtime after a DR signal is received by the cloud provider. This helps minimize the cost incurred by a cloud provider and yet provide adequate service level guarantees as stated in the service level agreements (SLA). The current work develops models and solution schemes for identifying suitable applications for migration and placing such applications on remote cloud sites to take advantages of pricing schemes such as the time-of-use pricing and real time pricing.