Managing the cost, energy consumption, and carbon footprint of internet services

Abstract

The large amount of energy consumed by Internet services represents significant and fast-growing financial and environmental costs. This paper introduces a general, optimization-based framework and several request distribution policies that enable multi-data-center services to manage their brown energy consumption and leverage green energy, while respecting their service-level agreements (SLAs) and minimizing energy cost. Our policies can be used to abide by caps on brown energy consumption that might arise from various scenarios such as government imposed Kyoto-style carbon limits. Extensive simulations and real experiments show that our policies allow a service to trade off consumption and cost. For example, using our policies, a service can reduce brown energy consumption by 24% for only a 10% increase in cost, while still abiding by SLAs.