A Measurement Study of Server Utilization in Public Clouds

Due to a server's non-proportional energy consumption, it is highly desirable to increase server utilization in order to lower energy consumption and minimize environmental impact. To increase the utilization level, we must first understand the current utilization level in the state-of-the-art cloud environment. Towards that goal, we devise a new technique which can be used to measure the CPU utilization in a cloud. We sampled two different infrastructure cloud providers (IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service) on their server utilization. Surprisingly, our results show that there is a significant room for improvement.