Global IT Manageability Policies across Service Boundaries in a Cloud Environment

As cloud computing becomes a mainstream technology, information technology (IT) organizations rely increasingly on outsourced functions: today customer relationship management (CRM) and human resources (HR) applications, and even e-mail are commonly delegated to service providers. This relationship can be recursive. Software as a service (SaaS) providers may not own their infrastructure. If their expertise is on the application domain, they will have a strong incentive to focus on their area of strength and in turn delegate the infrastructure provisioning to an IaaS provider. Under these relationships, there is inherently less transparency about the service components when services cross organizational boundaries as in private clouds or even company boundaries. It is difficult to implement manageability policies for a composite application made of outsourced components. For instance, there is no widely adopted method for service providers to report the energy consumption of their respective services nor there exist enforcement mechanisms to impose power limitations. These mechanisms would be needed to comply with regulations to report the carbon footprint of an application as a whole. Static estimation methods can be devised, but they require generous safety margins because they are inherently inaccurate. If these estimates are used to calculate a carbon emissions tax, it is in the economic interest of the organization to make these estimates as accurate as possible. Needed in this environment are mechanisms for service metadata exchange, information about the service itself. Service providers with this capability will have a first mover advantage, allowing their service consumers to implement global energy policies. The provider could implement innovative pricing schemes, such as lowering the baseline charges for the services in exchange for the service consumer covering and assuming the risks for energy consumption. We present a number of alternatives for the conveyance of metadata across service boundaries.