The Challenge of Cloud Control

Today’s cloud data center infrastructures are not even near being able to cope with the enormous and rapidly varying capacity demands that will be reality in a near future. So far, very little is understood about how to transform today’s data centers (being large, power-hungry facilities, and operated through heroic efforts by numerous administrators) into a self-managed, dynamic, and dependable infrastructure, constantly delivering expected QoS with reasonable operation costs and acceptable carbon footprint for large-scale services with sometimes dramatic variations in capacity demands. In this paper, we discuss some of the major challenges for resource-optimized cloud data center. We propose a new research area called Cloud Control, which is a control theoretic approach to a range of cloud management problems, aiming to transform today's static and energy consuming cloud data centers into self-managed, dynamic, and dependable infrastructures, constantly delivering expected quality of service with acceptable operation costs and carbon footprint for large-scale services with varying capacity demands.