Control strategies for predictable brownouts in cloud computing

Cloud computing is an application hosting model providing the illusion of infinite computing power. However, even the largest datacenters have finite computing capacity, thus cloud infrastructures have experienced overload due to overbooking or transient failures.

The topic of this paper is the comparison of different control strategies to mitigate overload for datacenters, that assume that the running cloud applications are cooperative and help the infrastructure in recovering from critical events. Specifically, the paper investigates the behavior of different controllers when they have to keep the average response time of a cloud application below a certain threshold by acting on the probability of serving requests with optional computations disabled, where the pressure exerted by each request on the infrastructure is diminished, at the expense of user experience.