ITU-T Approves First International Standard for Cloud Computing Energy Consumption Management and Optimization Platform

On October 27, 2022, at the 2nd plenary meeting of ITU-T SG5 (EMF, environment, climate action, sustainable digitalization, and circular economy) for the 2022-2024 study period, the world's first technical standard for cloud computing energy consumption optimization platform, "Energy consumption management and optimization platform Framework for cloud computing" (TD530-R1), was approved and officially立项 (established) through plenary review.

This meeting was attended remotely by technical experts from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) and the OpenCloudOS community. Representatives from 76 member countries, 69 sector members, 3 associate sector members, 3 academic members, and other standardization organizations participated, totaling 169 representatives. The meeting included 1 opening plenary session, 6 rapporteur group sessions, and 1 closing plenary session.

Background - Energy-Saving and Low-Carbon Technology

The impact of global climate change poses increasingly severe challenges to human survival and development. Achieving carbon neutrality has become a global consensus, and digital technology plays an important role in helping the world address climate change.

Cloud computing provides essential IT infrastructure for the global digital economy. While cloud-based digital technologies enable various industries to transition to low-carbon development and drive green technology innovation, the energy consumption of cloud computing itself has been a widespread international concern.

While the IDC sector has established a comprehensive set of energy-saving practices and standards using green energy, there has been a lack of globally recognized energy-saving technical architecture and practical guidance for cloud computing basic services, particularly in the IaaS domain.

Technical Features of the "WuNeng" System

Based on OpenCloudOS server energy optimization achievements, this standard draft proposes a technical framework for energy consumption optimization at the cloud computing IaaS service layer, including energy optimization technical frameworks for server operating systems, storage, and networks.

The "WuNeng" technical system, developed by the OpenCloudOS community, is a key component of the server and operating system elastic scheduling technology solution. It achieves energy savings through CPU elastic operation and deep sleep at the operating system level, combined with power consumption monitoring and fine-grained power management, integrating software and hardware.

In actual testing, the "WuNeng" system can reduce energy consumption by 5%-30% with less than 0.1% performance loss. This saves Tencent's data centers 600 million KWH annually and reduces carbon emissions by 240,000 tons per year. The technology can be extended to all IDCs, holding significant long-term importance for national carbon neutrality strategies.

Green, Low-Carbon Next-Generation Cloud-Native Operating System

OpenCloudOS is an operating system community project initiated by more than 100 operating system, cloud platform, software and hardware vendors and individuals, dedicated to building a green, low-carbon next-generation cloud-native operating system. Centered on containers, OpenCloudOS achieves intelligent elastic multi-priority mixed deployment through time-division elastic resource QoS, enabling low-cost digital transformation and cloud computing with low power consumption.

In real business scenarios such as social media, gaming, financial payments, AI, security, and big data, OpenCloudOS has been validated through millions of nodes over extended periods, with availability reaching 99.999%. Compared to CentOS 7 and other open-source community versions, OpenCloudOS reduces failure rates by over 70% and improves performance by over 50% in typical business scenarios.