Stratus: Load balancing the cloud for carbon emissions control

Abstract

Large public cloud infrastructure can utilize power which is generated by a multiplicity of power plants. The cost of electricity will vary among the power plants and each will emit different amounts of carbon for a given amount of energy generated. This infrastructure services traffic that can come from anywhere on the planet. It is desirable, for latency purposes, to route the traffic to the data center that is closest in terms of geographical distance, costs the least to power, and emits the smallest amount of carbon for a given request. It is not always possible to achieve all of these goals, so we model both the networking and computational components of the infrastructure as a graph and propose the Stratus system which utilizes Voronoi partitions to determine which data center requests should be routed to based on the relative priorities of the cloud operator.