BrownoutCon: A software system based on brownout and containers for energy-efficient cloud computing

Abstract

VM consolidation and Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling approaches have been proved to be efficient to reduce energy consumption in cloud data centers. However, the existing approaches cannot function efficiently when the whole data center is overloaded. An approach called brownout has been proposed to solve the limitation, which dynamically deactivates or activates optional microservices or containers. In this paper, we propose a brownout-based software system for container-based clouds to handle overloads and reduce power consumption. We present its design and implementation based on Docker Swarm containers. The proposed system is integrated with existing Docker Swarm without the modification of their configurations. To demonstrate the potential of BrownoutCon software in offering energy-efficient services in brownout situation, we implemented several policies to manage containers and conducted experiments on French Grid’5000 cloud infrastructure. The results show the currently implemented policies in our software system can save about 10%–40% energy than the existing baselines while ensuring quality of services.