Adaptive green hosting

  • Authors:

  • Nan Deng;Christopher Stewart;Daniel Gmach;Martin Arlitt;Jaimie Kelley

  • Affiliations:

  • The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA;The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA;HP Labs, Palo Alto, CA, USA;HP Labs, Palo Alto, CA, USA;The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Autonomic computing
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

The growing carbon footprint of Web hosting centers contributes to climate change and could harm the public's perception of Web hosts and Internet services. A pioneering cadre of Web hosts, called green hosts, lower their footprints by cutting into their profit margins to buy carbon offsets. This paper argues that an adaptive approach to buying carbon offsets can increase a green host's total profit by exploiting daily, bursty patterns in Internet service workloads. We make the case in three steps. First, we present a realistic, geographically distributed service that meets strict SLAs while using green hosts to lower its carbon footprint. We show that the service routes requests between competing hosts differently depending on its request arrival rate and on how many carbon offsets each host provides. Second, we use empirical traces of request arrivals to compute how many carbon offsets a host should provide to maximize its profit. We find that diurnal fluctuations and bursty surges interrupted long contiguous periods where the best carbon offset policy held steady, leading us to propose a reactive approach. For certain hosts, our approach can triple the profit compared to a fixed approach used in practice. Third, we simulate 9 services with diverse carbon footprint goals that distribute their workloads across 11 Web hosts worldwide. We use real data on the location of Web hosts and their provided carbon offset policies to show that adaptive green hosting can increase profit by 152% for one of today's larger green hosts.