Arcus is an internally funded project which focuses on correlating energy consumption with cloud usage information to enable a cloud provider to understand in detail how her energy is consumed – as energy continues to account for an increasing amount of a cloud provider’s operating costs, this issue is increasing in importance.

The work focuses on correlating cloud usage information obtained from Openstack (primarily via Ceilometer) with energy consumption information obtained from the devices, using a mix of internal readings and wireless metering infrastructure. It involves determining which users of the cloud stack are consuming energy at any point in time by fine-grained monitoring of the energy consumption in the system coupled with information on how the systems will be used.

The output of the project will be a tool which will enable an Openstack provider to see this relationship: it could be used by a public cloud provider to help them understand how their tariffing structure relates to their costs or for a private cloud operator to understand which internal applications or departments may be most responsible for energy consumption.

The project started in January 2014.