Prof. Monica Vitali from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of the Politecnico di Milano was awarded the Best Exploratory Paper Award for the paper “Towards Greener Applications: Enabling Sustainable-aware Cloud Native Applications Design”, presented during the 34th edition of the International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering which was held in Leuven, Belgium, from 6 to 10 June 2022.
Data centers energy demand is increasing. While a great deal of effort has been made to reduce the amount of CO2 generated by large cloud providers, too little has been done from the application perspective. Prof. Vitali claims that application developers can impact the environmental footprint by enhancing the application design with additional features. Following the proposed Sustainable Application Design Process (SADP), the application design is enriched with information that can be leveraged by cloud providers to manage application execution in an energy-aware manner.
The paper aims to emphasize the awareness of the sustainability of applications by proposing a methodology for its evaluation. To this end, Prof. Vitali suggests possible actions to enrich the application design toward sustainability, and finally, describes how this additional information can be leveraged in the application workflow. The feasibility of the proposed methodology is discussed by referring to existing tools and technologies capable of supporting the design features in a production environment.