Enriching Cloud-native Applications with Sustainability Features

Abstract

Due to the ever-growing demand for computational resources, the environmental impact of data centers is continuously increasing. Recently, a great effort has been made to mitigate this impact, while the demand for computational resources has continued to grow. Current mitigation strategies focus on the infrastructure perspective, while the application perspective has been neglected. This paper aims to engage application designers and developers on the path to greener application design. Following the Sustainable Application Design Process (SADP) methodology, we introduce a Sustainable Application Design Architecture (SADA) for enriching cloud-native application components with sustainability features that can be exploited to adapt the application workflow to the environmental context. The architecture enables synergies from design to deployment between all stakeholders involved in the application management. The paper focuses on enriching the application with sustainability features in the design and development phases. We also present and discuss a prototype that can translate designlevel sustainability features into development features.