Guiding Cloud Application Developers in Designing Balanced Trade-off among Energy impacting Requirements

ICT energy efficiency is a growing concern. A great effort was already done making hardware more energy efficient and aware. Although a part of that effort is devoted to specific software areas like embedded/mobile systems, much remains to be done at the software level, especially for applications deployed in the Cloud. There is a increasing need to help Cloud application developers to learn to reason about how much energy is consumed by their applications on the server-side. In this paper, we present how to help developers to capture and deal with the interrelation between energy goals and other possibly conflicting non-functional requirements with the aim to guide them in the selection of a balanced compromise. For this purpose, we extend our previous toolset already supporting the capture of energy requirements through a Goal-Question-Metric approach and the design of an energy-aware solution using a specific UML KPI profile.