Towards Automated Business-Driven Indication and Mitigation of VM Sprawl in Cloud Supply Chains

This paper discusses a business-oriented phenomenon called the Bullwhip Effect that affects the efficiency of traditional supply chains, identifying how it applies to the world of Cloud Computing. Comparisons are made between a traditional supply chain and the Cloud supply chain in order to observe how these relate with each other. In doing so, the occurrence of Virtual Machine (VM) Sprawl in Cloud data-centers is seen as a derivative of the Bullwhip Effect, such that the indicators and mitigation strategies from traditional supply chains could be applied in the context of Cloud supply chains. Indicators were derived for each of the problem areas, which can be seen as a sign of the VM Sprawl in a specific Cloud supply chain. Approaches to automation and monitoring are also considered, and a prototypical implementation is described.