A Survey on Modeling Energy Consumption of Cloud Applications: Deconstruction, State of the Art, and Trade-off Debates

Given the complexity and heterogeneity in Cloud computing scenarios, the modeling approach has widely been employed to investigate and analyze the energy consumption of Cloud applications, by abstracting real-world objects and processes that are difficult to observe or understand directly. It is clear that the abstraction sacrifices, and usually does not need, the complete reflection of the reality to be modeled. Consequently, current energy consumption models vary in terms of purposes, assumptions, application characteristics and environmental conditions, with possible overlaps between different research works. Therefore, it would be necessary and valuable to reveal the state-of-the-art of the existing modeling efforts, so as to weave different models together to facilitate comprehending and further investigating application energy consumption in the Cloud domain. By systematically selecting, assessing and synthesizing 76 relevant studies, we rationalized and organized over 30 energy consumption models with unified notations. To help investigate the existing models and facilitate future modeling work, we deconstructed the runtime execution and deployment environment of Cloud applications, and identified 18 environmental factors and 12 workload factors that would be influential on the energy consumption. In particular, there are complicated trade-offs and even debates when dealing with the combinational impacts of multiple factors.