Recent Trends in Energy Efficient Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing represents the most promising Information and Communication Technology (ICT) paradigm that is directly or indirectly used by almost every online user. Its ultrascale size requires large data centers comprising several thousands of servers and other supporting equipment. The power consumption share of such infrastructures reaches 1.1 % to 1.5 % of the total electricity use worldwide, and is projected to rise even more. In this paper, we describe recent trends in Cloud Computing regarding the energy efficiency of its supporting infrastructure. We present the state of the art approaches found in literature and in practice covering servers, networking, Cloud management systems and appliances, which consists of a software utilized by end users. We describe benefits and trade-offs when applying energy efficiency techniques, and finally we extract existing challenges and highlight future research directions