Energy efficient data centres within smart cities: IAAS and PAAS optimizations

Abstract

Data centres are power-hungry facilities that host ICT services and consume huge amount of the global electricity production. Consequently, in the last years, research trends in the field focused on mechanisms able to reduce the overall consumption of a data centre so as to reduce its energy footprint. In this paper, we argue that the data centres for city needs should be located physically in the smart city, in order to address smart city needs, and serve citizens without any latency. Furthermore, those data centres should strive to make their energy footprint greener, i.e. consume more renewable energy. We present the concept of Service Flexibility Agreement (SFA), an extension of the traditional SLA able to qualify the flexibility of applications deployed in a smart city cloud environment. In particular, we detail preliminary models able to exploit this flexibility in order to increase the ratio of renewable energy consumed. The introduction of new solutions, such as containers and platform as a service (PaaS) in cloud data-centres also opens new challenges and opportunities. We describe how the combination of PaaS and IaaS cloud layers provide the needed flexibility to support the SFA.