The utilization of Cloud infrastructures is constantly growing. Such trend impacts on the environment causing the increase of CO2 emissions. The ECO2Clouds project aims to investigate strategies able to guarantee the efficiencies of the cloud data centers reducing energy wastes and CO2 emissions.
Cloud data centers contain all the resources to satisfy the constantly increasing computation and data storage needs. A data center consumes a terrific amount of energy and its impact on the environment cannot be ignored.
The main goal of ECO2Clouds is to provide a sustainable and innovative approach to Cloud computing service delivery by:

1. developing extensions and mechanisms to quantify the environmental impact of cloud applications at infrastructure and application level;
2. incorporating carbon footprint concerns into a federated cloud deployment strategy;
3. developing optimization mechanisms that can enable optimal utilization of federated cloud infrastructure;
4. developing adaptation mechanisms that can perform changes to a running application in order to save energy.

The ECO2Clouds project combines cloud computing with environmental issues. Research aims to develop a novel application deployment strategy on the Cloud infrastructure to guarantee a high quality service delivery reducing energy wastes and CO2 emissions. In particular, ECO2Clouds will conduct experimentally-driven research to investigate cutting-edge practices for sustainable federated cloud sourcing and proposing optimization models.
The carbon-aware mechanisms developed in the ECO2Clouds project will complement existing the multi-cloud facility provided by the FP7 project BonFIRE (Building Service Testbeds on Future Internet Research and Experimentation) to provide a much needed, eco-aware infrastructure, tailored to the needs of the Cloud research community.
The CO2-aware cloud sourcing strategy resulting from this project will primarily have a positive impact on the environment. Furthermore, for Cloud users and cloud research community the benefits will be in terms of feedback and recommendations regarding the federated Cloud infrastructure tested in the project, the performance of the respective deployment optimization and adaptation mechanisms, and the development of deployment strategies including CO2 awareness. Finally, commercial enterprises will benefit from innovative ideas concerning design of Cloud sourcing strategies and general guidelines regarding the distribution of computationally intensive models onto federated Cloud infrastructure.