8. Monitoring, Updates, and Review Timing

Greenpixie maintains the methodology on a rolling basis rather than on a fixed release cycle. When cloud providers release new instance families, new processor designs, or new accelerators, Greenpixie researches the published specifications and extends its record of instance specifications accordingly. Where a cloud provider still bills an instance size it no longer lists among its current sizes, Greenpixie takes that size's specifications from the cloud provider's own documentation for previous-generation and end-of-life sizes. Greenpixie refreshes its copy of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation's database of published server measurements.

As memory module manufacturers publish documentation for new memory generations, Greenpixie revises the memory module power reference described in Section 5.5. As chip vendors publish documentation for new accelerator parts and processor designs, it revises the accelerator and processor specifications described in Sections 5.4 and 5.7. It re-reads the cloud provider baseline allowances for burstable sizes against the cloud provider's own tables at each release, as a cloud provider may change an allowance without announcement. At each release it also reviews, for each processor a cloud provider designs for its own fleet, the related processor its curve is scaled from, against the published measurements as they then stand. Where a newly published measurement covers a more closely related processor than the one in use, Greenpixie scales from that processor instead. The figures for instances built on the processor being modelled change as a result.