Exploiting Renewable Sources: When Green SLA Becomes a Possible Reality in Cloud Computing

TLDR

Cloud services are rapidly expanding, yet their environmental impact remains unclear, and meeting green service demands is hampered by the intermittent nature of renewable energy. This study proposes a green energy management scheme that integrates renewable sources into data centers to enable Green SLAs. The scheme introduces virtualization of green energy, extends the CSLA language with two new threshold parameters, and implements the greenSLA algorithm to generate interval‑specific Green SLAs. Experiments using PlanetLab workloads and SPECpower models show that Green SLAs can be achieved without increasing costs.

Abstract

While the proliferation of cloud services have greatly impacted our society, how green are these services is yet to be answered. Although, demand escalation for green services has grown due to societal awareness, the approaches to provide green services and establish Green SLAs remain oblivious for cloud or infrastructure providers. The main challenge for cloud provider is to manage Green SLAs with their customers while satisfying their business objectives, such as maximizing profits by lowering expenditure for green energy. Since, Green SLA needs to be proposed based on the presence of green energy, the intermittent nature of renewable sources makes it difficult to be achieved. In response, this paper presents a scheme for green energy management in the presence of explicit and implicit integration of renewable energy in data center. More specifically we propose three contributions: i) we introduce the concept of virtualization of green energy to address the uncertainty of green energy availability, ii) we extend the Cloud Service Level Agreement (CSLA) language to support Green SLA by introducing two new threshold parameters and iii) we introduce greenSLA algorithm which leverages the concept of virtualization of green energy to provide per interval specific Green SLA. Experiments were conducted with real workload profile from PlanetLab and server power model from SPECpower to demonstrate that, Green SLA can be successfully established and satisfied without incurring higher cost.