Evaluation of energy consumption in virtualization environments : Proof of concept using containers

Abstract: The demand for cloud services offering virtualization increases with a continual interest for different types of applications. Regardless of the resource demand of the application, some supplier is billing by the time of usage, making it an unfair pricing for the clients. In this thesis, the virtualization characterization and properties make room for another form of payment qualities. Since power consumption is comprehensible and an understandable measurement for both parties it is investigated if there are any useful ways of measuring energy consumption of an application. The thesis creates a proof of concept of predicting energy consumption from CPU usage from a containerized application. With an empirical simulation and the use of linear regression, the results are feasible of estimating the energy consumption from the simulation data with a 0.813 Watt deviation. Even though the proof of concept is a harsh simplification of the dilemma for predicting energy consumption from an application, the thesis embraces the issue of energy consumption within data centers.