Computing and Information Systems - Theses

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    Understanding how cloud computing enables business model innovation in start-up companies
    Alrokayan, Mohammed ( 2017)
    Start-up companies contribute significantly to the national economies of many countries but their failure rate is notably high. Successful start-ups typically depend on innovative business models to be competitive and maintain profitability. This thesis explores how the new technologies of cloud computing might enable start-ups to create and maintain competitive advantage. A conceptual framework called Cloud-Enabled Business Model Innovation (CEBMI) is presented that identifies three research questions concerning how cloud computing might enable business model innovation, what form this innovation takes, and how the innovation leads to competitive advantage. These questions were then investigated through three empirical studies involving six case studies with start-ups and two qualitative studies involving interviews with 11 business consultants and three cloud service providers. The detailed findings are presented as a set of key propositions that offer answers to the research questions, and together sketch a view of how CEBMI might enable start-ups to achieve competitive advantage.
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    Energy and carbon-efficient resource management in geographically distributed cloud data centers
    Khosravi, Atefeh ( 2017)
    Cloud computing provides on-demand access to computing resources for users across the world. It offers services on a pay-as-you-go model through data center sites that are scattered across diverse geographies. However, cloud data centers consume huge amount of electricity and leave high amount of carbon footprint in the ecosystem. This makes data centers responsible for 2% of the global CO2 emission, the same as the aviation industry. Therefore, having energy and carbon-efficient techniques for distributed cloud data centers is inevitable. Cloud providers while efficiently allocating computing resources to users, should also meet their required quality of service. The main objective of this thesis is to address the problem of energy and carbon efficient resource management in geographically distributed cloud data centers. It focuses on the techniques for VM placement, investigates the parameters with largest effect on the energy and carbon cost, migration of VMs between data center sites to harvest renewable energy sources, and prediction of renewable energy to maximize its usage. The key contributions of this thesis are as follows: (1) A VM placement algorithm to optimally select the data center and server to reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint with considering energy and carbon related parameters. (2) A dynamic method for the initial placement of VMs in geographically distributed cloud data centers that simultaneously considers energy and carbon cost and maximizes renewable energy utilization at each data center to minimize the total cost. (3) Variations of VM placement methods, which explore the effects of different parameters in minimizing energy and carbon cost for a cloud computing environment. (4) The optimal offline algorithm and two online algorithms, which exploit available renewable energy levels across distributed data center sites for VM migration to minimize total energy cost and maximize renewable energy usage. (5) A prediction model for renewable energy availability at data center sites to incorporate into online VM migration algorithm and maximize renewable energy usage.