A Self-Adaptive Approach for Managing Applications and Harnessing Renewable Energy for Sustainable Cloud Computing

• Published in: IEEE transactions on sustainable computing Vol. 6; no. 4; pp. 544 - 558
• Main Authors: Xu, Minxian, Toosi, Adel Nadjaran, Buyya, Rajkumar
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01.10.2021; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; brownout; Carbon; Cloud computing; Cloud data centers; Computational modeling; Computer centers; Data centers; Energy; Energy consumption; microservices; QoS; Renewable energy; renewable energy efficiency; Renewable energy sources; Renewable resources; Resource management; Resource utilization; Sustainable development; Web services; Workload; Workloads
• ISSN: 2377-3782; 2377-3790
• DOI: 10.1109/TSUSC.2020.3014943

Rapid adoption of Cloud computing for hosting services and its success is primarily attributed to its attractive features such as elasticity, availability and pay-as-you-go pricing model. However, the huge amount of energy consumed by cloud data centers makes it to be one of the fastest growing sources of carbon emissions. Approaches for improving the energy efficiency include enhancing the resource utilization to reduce resource wastage and applying the renewable energy as the energy supply. This work aims to reduce the carbon footprint of the data centers by reducing the usage of brown energy and maximizing the usage of renewable energy. Taking advantage of microservices and renewable energy, we propose a self-adaptive approach for the resource management of interactive workloads and batch workloads. To ensure the quality of service of workloads, a brownout-based algorithm for interactive workloads and a deferring algorithm for batch workloads are proposed. We have implemented the proposed approach in a prototype system and evaluated it with web services under real traces. The results illustrate our approach can reduce the brown energy usage by 21 percent and improve the renewable energy usage by 10 percent.