An energy-aware design and reporting tool for on-demand service infrastructures

During last years, great progress has been made in exposing the energy consumption of computing equipment and providing infrastructure users with mechanisms to adequate power expenditures to the performance levels required from hardware elements. However, mapping such hardware-level capabilities to service-level energy monitoring and control mechanisms is not straightforward in advanced service delivery scenarios, where the implementation of virtualization technologies and the adoption of the cloud computing paradigm abstract infrastructure users from the physical details of the platform where their services are running. In this context, this paper presents the energy-aware design and reporting capabilities introduced in the management system of an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform in order to assist users in defining energy-efficient infrastructure architectures and provide infrastructure users and providers with service-level energy chargeback information. The energy estimation mechanisms employed to assess architecture designs and the energy apportionment procedures used to attribute service energy consumption are detailed, providing also practical usage examples to clarify their utilization within the management system.