Software tactics for sustainable cloud : an empirical study

Abstract

One of the ways for reducing carbon emissions in cloud computing involves reducing the energy consumption of the software applications running on cloud data centers. This master’s thesis focuses on examining the impact of a software tactic on the energy consumption of a software application in the context of cloud computing. The objective is to provide data on the energy-related implications of software tactic adoption, along with the associated trade-offs. Moreover, the study assesses the potential influence of a specific tactic, namely the cloud-native API gateway, on the response time of cloud-hosted software applications. To gather this data, the study employs an empirical experiment featuring a single factor (application type) and two treatments (implementation without the software tactic and implementation with the software tactic). The study spans four distinct user workloads to observe diverse application behaviors. From the results, it can be concluded that since the energy consumption for the two different implementations is based on different energy metrics, a direct comparison is not feasible, therefore it is concluded that there is no significant difference in energy consumption. In relation to response time, there significant difference observed for some workloads and it is crucial to consider this aspect when adopting the software tactic.