Towards Sustainable Cloud Computing: Innovations in Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation
Srinivasa Rao Thumala, Harikrishna Madathala, Shubham Sharma · 2025
The rapid expansion of cloud computing has significantly increased energy consumption in data centers, posing critical financial, operational, and environmental challenges. To address these issues, energy-efficient resource allocation has become a cornerstone for optimizing energy usage while ensuring high service quality and system reliability. This paper comprehensively analyzes state-of-the-art techniques, including dynamic workload management, predictive analytics for intelligent resource scheduling, and virtualization technologies tailored for multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. The transformative role of AI -driven algorithms and renewable energy integration is also examined, demonstrating their potential to drive sustainable and scalable cloud operations. Key tradeoffs between energy efficiency, performance, scalability, and cost are evaluated, offering actionable insights to practitioners and researchers. Furthermore, the paper highlights challenges such as computational overhead, policy compliance, and economic feasibility and proposes in-novative solutions for overcoming these barriers. This study outlines a roadmap for advancing greener, cost-effective cloud infrastructures that align with global sustainability goals by synthesizing recent advancements. Collaboration across industry, academia, and policymakers is emphasized to foster an ecosystem of environmentally responsible cloud computing solutions.