Seeing into a Public Cloud: Monitoring the Massachusetts Open Cloud

Cloud users today have little visibility into the performance characteristics, power consumption, and utilization of cloud resources; and the cloud has little visibility into user application performance requirements and critical metrics such as response time and throughput. This paper outlines new efforts to reduce the information gap between the cloud users and the cloud. We first present a scalable monitoring platform to collect and retain rich information on a regional public cloud. Second, we present two motivating use cases that leverage the collected information: (1) Participation in emerging smart grid demand response programs in order to reduce datacenter energy costs and stabilize power grid demands, (2) budgeting available power to applications via peak shaving. This work is done in the context of the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC), a new public cloud project that has a central goal of enabling cloud research.