Policy and mechanism for carbon-aware cloud applications

This position paper explores research challenges facing carbon-aware cloud applications. These applications run inside of a renewable-energy datacenter, provision resources on demand, and seek to minimize their use of carbon-heavy, grid energy. First, we argue that carbon-aware applications need new provisioning policies that address the uncertainty of renewable energy. Second, we argue that renewable-energy datacenters need mechanisms to determine the contribution of grid energy to specific application workloads. We propose first-cut solutions to these problems and present preliminary results for carbon-aware Web server running on a small renewable-energy cluster.