Green Cloud Computing and Environmental Sustainability

Cloud computing is a highly scalable and cost-effective infrastructure for running HPC, enterprise and Web applications. However, the growing demand of Cloud infrastructure has drastically increased the energy consumption of data centers, which has become a critical issue. High energy consumption not only translates to high operational cost, which reduces the profit margin of Cloud providers, but also leads to high carbon emissions which is not environmentally friendly. Hence, energy-efficient solutions are required to minimize the impact of Cloud computing on the environment. In order to design such solutions, deep analysis of Cloud is required with respect to their power efficiency. Thus, in this chapter, we discuss various elements of Clouds which contribute to the total energy consumption and how it is addressed in the literature. We also discuss the implication of these solutions for future research directions to enable green Cloud computing. The chapter also explains the role of Cloud users in achieving this goal.