Energy Monitoring in the Cloud: Insights from the Eco:Digit Project at FOSDEM 2025
Josefine Kipke, a team member of our project partner Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA), presented her part of the ECO:DIGIT project at FOSDEM 2025. Her talk focused on energy consumption in cloud environments and the challenges of creating accurate energy models. The recording of her presentation is now available for anyone who missed it or would like to watch it again.
FOSDEM is one of the largest conferences in Europe dedicated to free and open source software. Organized by volunteers, it provides a platform for developers and communities to exchange ideas, collaborate on projects, and stay informed about the latest advancements in open source technology. Held annually in Brussels, the event attracts thousands of participants from around the world, offering a diverse program of talks, workshops, and discussions.
Josefine Kipke’s talk addressed the environmental impact of cloud infrastructure, which contributes up to 4% of global carbon emissions. With the growing shift towards cloud-based workloads, there is an urgent need to manage energy consumption from both an economic and ecological perspective.
As part of the ECO:DIGIT project, the team explores methods for measuring and analyzing energy consumption in virtualized cloud environments. The presentation highlighted the development of energy profiles using open-source conform SCS clouds and examined key technical and methodological challenges. These include:
- Accessing host-level metrics in virtualized cloud environments
- Calibrating virtual energy consumption with physical resource usage
- Addressing transparency issues in hyperscaler cloud infrastructures
The talk also provided insights into designing a reliable test environment for mapping energy consumption across physical and virtual layers, integrating diverse monitoring tools, and collaborating with cloud providers such as PlusServer and ScaleUp. The current state of the project’s energy profiling system was also presented, demonstrating its capabilities for detailed energy consumption reports and its potential to drive sustainability in digital infrastructures.
The recording of the talk is now available:
https://ftp.belnet.be/mirror/FOSDEM/video/2025/h2214/fosdem-2025-5646-measure-what-you-manage-transparent-energy-consumption-of-cloud-infrastructure.mp4
