A Case for Virtualizing the Electric Utility in Cloud Data Centers Position paper

Since energy-related costs make up an increasingly sig-nificant component of overall costs for data centers run by cloud providers, it is important that these costs be propagated to their tenants in ways that are fair and pro-mote workload modulation that is aligned with overall cost-efficacy. We argue that there exists a big gap in how electric utilities charge data centers for their energy con-sumption (on the one hand) and the pricing interface ex-posed by cloud providers to their tenants (on the other). Whereas electric utilities employ complex features such as peak-based, time-varying, or tiered (load-dependent) pricing schemes, cloud providers charge tenants based on IT abstractions. This gap can create shortcomings such as unfairness in how tenants are charged and may also hinder overall cost-effective resource allocation. To overcome these shortcomings, we propose a novel idea of a virtual electric utility (VEU) that cloud providers should expose to individual tenants (in addition to their existing IT-based offerings). We discuss initial ideas un-derlying VEUs and challenges that must be addressed to turn them into a practical idea whose merits can be sys-tematically explored.