EMPower: The Case for a Cloud Power Control Plane

Escalating application demand and the end of Dennard scaling have put energy management at the center of cloud operations. Because of the huge cost and long lead time of provisioning new data centers, operators want to squeeze as much use out of existing data centers as possible, often limited by power provisioning fixed at the time of construction. Workload demand spikes and the inherent variability of renewable energy, as well as increased power unreliability from extreme weather events and natural disasters, make the data center power management problem even more challenging. We believe it is time to build a power control plane to provide fine-grained observability and control over data center power to operators. Our goal is to help make data centers substantially more elastic with respect to dynamic changes in energy sources and application needs, while still providing good performance to applications. There are many use cases for cloud power control, including increased power oversubscription and use of green energy, resilience to power failures, large-scale power demand response, and improved energy efficiency.