Title
Enabling Sustainable Clouds: The Case for Virtualizing the Energy System
Abstract
ABSTRACTCloud platforms' growing energy demand and carbon emissions are raising concern about their environmental sustainability. The current approach to enabling sustainable clouds focuses on improving energy-efficiency and purchasing carbon offsets. These approaches have limits: many cloud data centers already operate near peak efficiency, and carbon offsets cannot scale to near zero carbon where there is little carbon left to offset. Instead, enabling sustainable clouds will require applications to adapt to when and where unreliable low-carbon energy is available. Applications cannot do this today because their energy use and carbon emissions are not visible to them, as the energy system provides the rigid abstraction of a continuous, reliable energy supply. This vision paper instead advocates for a "carbon first" approach to cloud design that elevates carbon-efficiency to a firs--class metric. To do so, we argue that cloud platforms should virtualize the energy system by exposing visibility into, and software-defined control of, it to applications, enabling them to define their own abstractions for managing energy and carbon emissions based on their own requirements.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3472883.3487009
International Conference on Management of Data
Keywords
DocType
Citations 
Carbon-efficiency, virtualization, cloud computing, edge
Conference
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
8
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Noman Bashir121.38
Tian Guo26612.57
Mohammad H. Hajiesmaili38717.99
David Irwin456330.93
Prashant J. Shenoy56386521.30
Ramesh K. Sitaraman61928141.68
Abel Souza700.34
Adam Wierman81635106.57