State of the Art of micro-services/containers energy consumption solutions -PDS project#

Keywords#

  • Green Computing

  • Containers

  • Micro-services

  • Cloud

  • Power consumption measurement

Context#

Cloud computing and its many variations offer users considerable computing and storage capacities. The maturity of virtualization techniques has enabled the emergence of complex virtualized infrastructures, capable of rapidly deploying and reconfiguring virtual and elastic resources in increasingly distributed infrastructures. This resource management, transparent to users, gives the illusion of access to flexible, unlimited and almost immaterial resources.

However, the power consumption of these clouds is very real and worrying, as are the environmental impacts associated with their global emissions and their consumption of critical raw materials used to manufacture IT equipment. In a context where climate change is becoming more visible and impressive every year, with serious consequences for people and the planet, all sectors (transport, construction, agriculture, industry, etc.) must contribute to the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Despite their ability to optimize processes in other sectors (transport, energy, agriculture), clouds are not immune to this observation: the increasing slope of their greenhouse gas emissions must be reversed, or else their potential benefits in other sectors will be erased.

At the scale of a data center or a computer, it is now common that Cloud providers provide electrical consumption to the customers. However at the scale of a software service, this remains a challenge that cloud providers have to face. Indeed, the increasing software stack between the hardware and the user’s application (operating system, virtual machines, containers, orchestrators, microservices, etc.) as well as the interweaving between service calls makes it difficult to attribute a consumption to a service.

Subject#

This project aims to address the problem of measuring the consumption of a computing service hosted in a container and using other services hosted in other containers. The ultimate goal is that this consumption can be provided by a cloud provider for each hosted service.

Phases of the project and expected results#

  1. State of the art of microservices energy measure consumption challenges and existing solutions

  2. Write a synthesis

  3. If the student is interested, evaluations of energy consumption tools such as Scaphandre and Power API.

Outils et matériels#

Contact#