Enabling green content distribution network by cloud orchestration

Cloud providers seek to maximize their market share. Traditionally, they deploy datacenters with sufficient capacity to accommodate their entire compute demand while maintaining geographical affinity to its customers. Achieving these goals by a single cloud provider is increasingly unrealistic from a cost of ownership perspective. Moreover, the carbon emissions from underutilized datacenters place an increasing demand on electricity, and is an increasing factor in the cost of cloud provider datacenters. However, the recognition that on-demand video streaming now constitutes the bulk portion of traffic to Internet consumers provides a path to mitigate rising energy demand. On-demand video is usually served through Content Delivery Networks (CDN), often scheduled in backend and edge datacenters. This publication describes a CDN deployment solution that utilizes green energy to supply on-demand streaming workload. A cross-cloud provider collaboration will allow cloud providers to both operate near their customers and reduce operational costs, primarily by lowering the datacenter deployments per provider ratio. Our approach optimizes cross-datacenters deployment. Specifically, we model an optimized CDN-edge instance allocation system that maximizes, under a set of realistic constraints, green energy utilization. The architecture of this cross-cloud coordinator service is based on Ubernetes, an open source container cluster manager that is a federation of Kubernetes clusters. It is shown how, under reasonable constraints, it can reduce the projected datacenters carbon emissions growth by 22% from the currently reported consumption.