Energy Measurement for the Cloud

One of the aims of cloud-based services is to offer cost savings through elastic service provision. This elasticity refers to use of resources by the customer and the provision of resources by the provider. An increasingly important resource to consider is energy (or power). As cloud services are intended to be ‘always on’ the energy costs of cloud service provision is already significant, and will continue to rise as global energy prices continue to rise and more users make use of cloud services. While providers can invest in energy-efficient hardware, how can we make users (customers) energy-aware, and incentives users towards energy-efficient use of cloud systems? Clearly, being able to measure actual energy usage will allow the provision of suitable feedback to users, as well as enable new energy-aware systems metrics that allow systems management policies to become responsive to energy usage. We list the requirements and described a prototype for such an energy measurement system.