A Taxonomy and Survey of Power Models and Power Modeling for Cloud Servers

Abstract

Due to the increasing demand of cloud resources, the ever-increasing number and scale of cloud data centers make their massive power consumption a prominent issue today. Evidence reveals that the behaviors of cloud servers make the major impact on data centers’ power consumption. Although extensive research can be found in this context, a systematic review of the models and modeling methods for the entire hierarchy (from underlying hardware components to the upper-layer applications) of the cloud server is still missing, which is supposed to cover the relevant studies on physical and virtual cloud server instances, server components, and cloud applications. In this article, we summarize a broad range of relevant studies from three perspectives: power data acquisition, power models, and power modeling methods for cloud servers (including bare-metal, virtual machine (VM), and container instances). We present a comprehensive taxonomy on the collection methods of server-level power data, the existing mainstream power models at multiple levels from hardware to software and application, and commonly used methods for modeling power consumption including classical regression analysis and emerging methods like reinforcement learning. Throughout the work, we introduce a variety of models and methods, illustrating their implementation, usability, and applicability while discussing the limitations of existing approaches and possible ways of improvement. Apart from reviewing existing studies on server power models and modeling methods, we further figure out several open challenges and possible research directions, such as the study on modeling the power consumption of lightweight virtual units like unikernel and the necessity of further explorations toward empowering server power estimation/prediction with machine learning. As power monitoring is drawing increasing attention from cloud service providers (CSPs), this survey provides useful guidelines on server power modeling and can be inspiring for further research on energy-efficient data centers.