A Simplified Method of Measurement of Energy Consumption in Cloud and Virtualized Environment
I Made Murwantara, Behzad Bordbar · 2014
Measuring energy consumption is an essential step in the development of policies for the management of energy in every IT system. There is a wide range of methods using both hardware and software for measuring energy consumed by the system accurately. However, most of these methods measure energy consumed by a machine or a cluster of machines. In environments such as Cloud that an application can be built from components with comparable characteristics, measuring energy consumed by a single component can be extremely beneficial. For example, if we can measure energy consumed by different HTTP servers, then we can establish which one consumes less energy performing a given task. As a result, the Cloud provider can provide incentives, so that, application developers use the HTTP server that consume less energy. Indeed, considering size of the Cloud, even a small amount of saving per Virtual Machine can add up to a substantial saving. In this paper, we propose a technique to measure energy consumed by an application via measuring energy consumed by the individual processes of the application. We shall deal with applications that run in a virtualized environment such as Cloud. We present two implementations of our idea to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach. Firstly, a method of measurement with the help of Kernel-Based Virtual Machine running on a typical laptop is presented. Secondly, in a commercial Cloud such as Elastic host, we describe a method of measuring energy consumed by processes such as HTTP servers. This will allow commercial providers to identify which product consumes less energy on their platform.