Carbon Containers: A System-level Facility for Managing Application-level Carbon Emissions

TL;DR

This paper introduces Carbon Containers, a system-level facility that automatically manages application carbon emissions by adjusting resource allocation and migration, improving carbon-efficiency and performance in cloud datacenters.

Contribution

We present Carbon Containers, a novel system that enforces user-specified carbon emission limits through dynamic resource management, extending power container concepts for better environmental control.

Findings

Carbon Containers reduce carbon emissions compared to prior methods.

They improve application performance while maintaining similar emission levels.

The system is effective in regions with stable, high carbon-intensity.

Abstract

To reduce their environmental impact, cloud datacenters' are increasingly focused on optimizing applications' carbon-efficiency, or work done per mass of carbon emitted. To facilitate such optimizations, we present Carbon Containers, a simple system-level facility, which extends prior work on power containers, that automatically regulates applications' carbon emissions in response to variations in both their workload's intensity and their energy's carbon-intensity. Specifically, \carbonContainerS enable applications to specify a maximum carbon emissions rate (in g$\cdot$CO$_2$e/hr), and then transparently enforce this rate via a combination of vertical scaling, container migration, and suspend/resume while maximizing either energy-efficiency or performance. Carbon Containers are especially useful for applications that i) must continue running even during high-carbon periods, and ii) execute in regions with few variations in carbon-intensity. These low-variability regions also tend to have high average carbon-intensity, which increases the importance of regulating carbon emissions. We implement a Carbon Containers prototype by extending Linux Containers to incorporate the mechanisms above and evaluate it using real workload traces and carbon-intensity data from multiple regions. We compare Carbon Containers with prior work that regulates carbon emissions by suspending/resuming applications during high/low carbon periods. We show that Carbon Containers are more carbon-efficient and improve performance while maintaining similar carbon emissions.