Energy, performance and cost efficient cloud datacentres: A survey

In major Information Technology (IT) companies such as Google, Rackspace and Amazon Web Services (AWS), virtualization and containerization technologies are usually used to execute customers' workloads and applications - as part of their cloud computing services offering. The computational resources are provided through large-scale datacentres, which consume substantial amount of energy and, consequently, affect our environment with global warming. Cloud datacentres have become a backbone for today's business and economy, which are the fastest-growing electricity consumers, globally. Numerous studies suggest that similar to 30% of the US datacentres are comatose and the others are grossly less-utilized, which make it possible to save energy through technologies like virtualization and containerization. These technologies provide support for allocation and consolidation of workloads on appropriate resources. However, consolidation comprises migrations of virtual machines (VMs), containers and/or applications, depending on the underlying virtualization method; that are expensive in terms of energy consumption, performance degradation, and therefore, costs which is mostly not accounted for in many existing models, and, possibly, it could be more energy and performance efficient not to consolidate. This paper describes energy consumption and performance, therefore, cost issues of large-scale datacentres. Besides, we cover various methods for energy and performance efficient distributed systems, clouds and datacentres. We elaborate energy efficiency methods at three different levels: hardware; resource management; and applications. Besides these, different performance management techniques are mapped onto taxonomies and described in details. In last, energy, performance and cost management techniques, at geographically distributed and multi-access edge computing platforms, are described along with critical discussion. (C) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This paper discusses the impact of virtualization and containerization technologies on energy consumption, performance, and cost issues in large-scale data centres, highlighting the feasibility of energy saving and performance efficiency, and proposing energy and performance management methods at different levels.