The broader impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to improve usage of computing cloud resources to minimize waste. Increasingly, businesses are running IT infrastructure and operations in the cloud to reduce server expenses. However, leasing equivalent cloud space from major providers can cost companies as much as 50% of their revenue. This is in part because businesses must overprovision to accommodate potential surges in server use and to ensure that applications that cannot tolerate any downtime are not interrupted. This overprovisioning causes as much as 60% of unused/idle cloud space and an estimated $14 Billion in wasted spending annually. This project will enable users to reduce their cloud spend by up to 90% by taking advantage of deeply discounted server space available in spot markets, and it will further enable users to optimize their workloads by consolidating virtual machines, further reducing cost. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will focus on the development of two novel intelligent-automation-based solutions. The first technology will dramatically improve the usability of discounted virtual machine (VM) instances (Spot Instances) for critical applications by spawning containers on discounted Spot Instances and dynamically relocating containers between such instances based on availability and price. The second technology will address idle resource waste in the cloud by packing idle containers onto a small number of VMs during the idle period, minimizing the number of active VMs and thus reducing the cost of keeping services online. When the workload increases, the technology will relocate containers onto different VMs, without any service interruption. To establish feasibility, a prototype for each element will be designed and developed. Objectives include: 1) optimize network and storage for supporting the company?s patented container architecture for secure isolation of containers in the cloud; 2) develop a resource scheduler for both proposed solutions 3) develop a user interface for workload monitoring and configurations.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
