OpenNebula and GreenPow: Carbon-Aware Cloud-Edge Infrastructure

Why OpenNebula

OpenNebula is the open-source cloud management platform used by organizations that need fine-grained control over their infrastructure: data centers, national research networks, sovereign cloud deployments, and enterprise private clouds.

Its strength is flexibility. OpenNebula manages virtual machines, containers, and edge deployments across heterogeneous hardware, in environments where the operator retains full control of the infrastructure stack. It is the platform of choice when the alternative is a hyperscaler control plane that keeps the organization at arm's length from its own infrastructure.

This makes OpenNebula a natural fit for GreenPow's approach to carbon-aware cloud. The organizations running OpenNebula are exactly the organizations that need and can use carbon-aware orchestration at the infrastructure level.

What the Integration Provides

GreenPow's integration with OpenNebula layers carbon-aware placement and scheduling on top of OpenNebula's infrastructure management capabilities.

The integration exposes MAIZX signals - grid carbon intensity, energy pricing, infrastructure availability - to the OpenNebula scheduler. Workload placement decisions made by the scheduler can incorporate these signals as optimization criteria, alongside the standard criteria of resource availability and performance requirements.

For temporal workloads (batch jobs, scheduled tasks, background processing), the integration enables automatic deferral to lower-carbon time windows. For spatially flexible workloads (those that can run in multiple edge locations or data centers), it enables routing to the lower-carbon site.

The Carbon Ledger records outcomes at the workload level, providing per-job Scope 2 attribution that is usable for reporting and further optimization.

The Edge Dimension

Cloud-edge architectures distribute compute across a central cloud and multiple edge locations. Edge locations are often physically close to end users or data sources, but they vary significantly in their energy mix and grid characteristics.

For GreenPow, the edge dimension introduces both additional constraints (edge locations may have limited capacity and higher latency sensitivities) and additional opportunities (edge locations powered by on-site renewables or connected to cleaner grids offer carbon advantages for eligible workloads).

The OpenNebula integration handles this by extending the MAIZX signal and policy framework to edge locations alongside central cloud resources. The scheduler treats edge nodes and cloud nodes as a unified placement space, with carbon intensity as a first-class placement criterion at all locations.

Sovereign Cloud and Carbon

Many OpenNebula deployments are in sovereign cloud contexts: national research infrastructures, public sector clouds, regulated industry deployments. These contexts add data residency and jurisdiction constraints on top of the normal infrastructure considerations.

GreenPow's approach to sovereign deployments keeps residency constraints as hard limits in the MAIZX policy framework. Carbon optimization happens within the permitted boundary, not by moving data outside it. The Carbon Ledger records emissions attributable to infrastructure inside the sovereignty perimeter.

This combination - OpenNebula's infrastructure control, GreenPow's carbon-aware orchestration, within sovereign deployment constraints - is the stack that regulated and public sector organizations need for credible, verifiable cloud sustainability.

Getting Started

Organizations already running OpenNebula can integrate GreenPow's MAIZX layer without changing their existing infrastructure management approach. The integration is additive: it extends the placement policy available to the scheduler rather than replacing it.

Contact the GreenPow team to discuss how the integration applies to your OpenNebula deployment and what carbon optimization is available within your operating constraints.