Towards Energy Sustainability in Federated and Interoperable Clouds

Cloud federation is paving the way toward new business scenarios in which it is possible to enforce more flexible energy management strategies than in the past. Considering independent cloud providers, each one is exclusively bound to the specific energy supplier powering its datacenter. The situation radically changes if we consider a federation of cloud providers powered by both a conventional energy supplier and a renewable energy generator. In such a context, the opportune relocation of computational workload among providers can lead to a global energy sustainability policy for the whole federation. In this work, the authors investigate the advantages and issues for the achievement of such a sustainable environment.