
Home servers are greener than cloud - atheiste
https://blog.freedombone.net/freedombox-at-ten
======
bloody-crow
> I didn't have any quantitative estimates then, and still don't now. However,
> it's likely that a world in which there is one server per household or per
> street would be more electrically efficient than the current world of
> billionaire cloud servers.

This is the core of the article and it's basically guesswork. From all I read,
I tend to believe the opposite actually. Cloud is a lot greener than home
servers.

~~~
antisthenes
Even just applying the basic principles of efficiencies of scale, it's almost
guaranteed to be true that cloud is greener.

Utility scale power, utility scale chip production, exabyte-scale storage
racks, generally more efficient chips (xeons vs desktop models), more
efficient server PSUs.

Not to mention less overhead like deliveries. You only need 1 truck to deliver
the hardware to the data center, whereas you might need 30-50-100 to deliver
computers to individual households.

> But given that a home server can run on 10W of electrical power, and
> potentially off of a solar panel I found this unpersuasive. I didn't have
> any quantitative estimates then, and still don't now.

This is laughable. It's not an argument for individual servers in households,
if anything, it's an argument for utility-scale solar and more efficient
software that runs efficiently on 10W CPUs.

~~~
LargoLasskhyfv
And all that for running utility scale software bloat somewhere else,
requiring networking infrastructure because the data isn't where it belongs.
Talk about _gridlock_ , and _hick-ups_ because some backhoe or fat fingered
admin tested the reliability of the the redundancy. As can be seen again and
again when all sorts of services degrade or fail globally because some cloud
experienced lightning. Instead of a single household, block, or city.

Yah, sure!

------
makerofspoons
AWS exceeded 50% renewable energy usage for 2018. My house is powered by gas.

"I didn't have any quantitative estimates then, and still don't now. However,
it's likely that a world in which there is one server per household or per
street would be more electrically efficient than the current world of
billionaire cloud servers."

My neighbors are powered by gas too. The only way this would work is if we all
also bought solar as the author suggests, however encouraging your average
homeowner to not only run a home server but also invest in solar for it is a
non-starter.

~~~
sp332
The argument is a little shaky, but I can see it. In a datacenter, heat is
just wasted energy that requires more energy to cool. Running a server is not
the most efficient way to heat a home, but at least the heat isn't just waste.

Also I suspect that a home server could just sleep the CPU a fair % of the
time. On top of that, you don't need to run a billing system that charges
different users for various things.

------
manacit
> But given that a home server can run on 10W of electrical power, and
> potentially off of a solar panel I found this unpersuasive. I didn't have
> any quantitative estimates then, and still don't now. However, it's likely
> that a world in which there is one server per household or per street would
> be more electrically efficient than the current world of billionaire cloud
> servers.

Sorry, but I don't buy it. DCs are frequently powered by solar
([https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/renewable/](https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/renewable/),
[https://sustainability.fb.com/innovation-for-our-
world/susta...](https://sustainability.fb.com/innovation-for-our-
world/sustainable-data-centers/)), and this article gives no actual evidence
other than home server being able to run on 10W. Solar and Wind projects are
successful in part because of economies of scale. While local-scale grids may
be great, using them to power services that run on cloud infrastructure today
don't seem like a wonderful application.

I have no doubt that the aggregate sum of my all of my cloud usage across
Google, FB, Amazon, etc. amounts to larger than 10W, but if you summed up all
of the different pieces of those services that I use, I doubt you'd ever be
able to scale them all down to something that could run at home, forget doing
it on 10W. There may be a small sliver of that which is possible (e.g. EMail),
but the fact of the matter is that it's almost irrelevant.

Coincidentally, the author of this post maintains a project that develops a
home server system, which means there's plenty of vested interest in pushing
this non-analysis.

~~~
moron4hire
That said, I'd love a "solar powered Raspberry Pi in a box" product to just
buy and setup in my backyard somewhere for my personal website.

------
sliken
Largely ignored by this article is that fact that everyone needs a router.
NASs are far from rare, the advantages of storage on the consumer side of a
relatively slow internet connection have advantages.

So it's not really 10 watt local server vs a shared of a cloud. It should be
something like 0.5 watts or similar to upgrade your home router to something
that could provide internet services. Likely just double the ram and provide a
microSD card for storage and that would be all you need. A 256GB microSD card,
even a fast one is around $50.00.

Seems like a bit of smarts, like a CDN, or even IPFS and collectively home
servers could make quite a bit of sense with close to zero power overhead.

------
oakwhiz
I think I disagree somewhat with the premise of this article. Computers are
more efficient in general when they are fully loaded. A home server is rarely
fully utilized and doesn't realize the full potential of
multitasking/virtualization. It is more efficient to share different tasks
among the same set of disks and memory. On the cloud, anything you didn't use
could theoretically be given to someone else.

The hardware lifecycle should also be considered. Although home environments
often recycle equipment, cloud environments are in a better position to get
more bang per watt, and can upgrade their SAN storage capacity easily to
handle changes in demand.

I suppose there is a lot of inefficiency in hitting all those switches and
routers on the way to a cloud's network. However that's shared with other
users as well.

~~~
sp332
I think the hardware lifecycle heavily favors the home server. This is
reflected in the much higher cost of cloud computing vs owning the hardware.
Cloud components have to be standardized and are swapped out _en masse_ every
few years.

~~~
Yetanfou
The _price_ of cloud computing is higher than that of owning and running the
hardware. As to whether that implies the _cost_ of running a commercial cloud
is higher than that of running individual servers on customer premises is
doubtful. I assume that the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle do not
run commercial cloud operations at a loss.

------
ekianjo
So the proof that it is greener than cloud is where?

~~~
nwah1
The article claims it is a gut feeling. Surprised this post made it here.

------
tryptophan
Fun fact, but CPUs/GPUs/etc are almost 100% efficient at converting
electricity to heat, as they don't give off light energy like a heater would,
via its glowing coils.

So, theoretically, heating your house with CPUs would be greener than using
central heating...

If you live in a cold area, a home server's heat wouldn't be wasted, in fact
it would theoretically lower your heating bill(by .01% or less, but hey!) as
less electricity would be used on the less efficient heater.

~~~
tzs
But wait...what happens to that small amount of energy that a heating coil
gives off as light? I'd expect that most of those photons end up getting
absorbed by something somewhere else in the room, and ultimately the energy
still ends up as heat.

------
moron4hire
Centralization is (always?) less efficient per-unit-work than
decentralization, because centralization requires a hierarchy of management
overhead to work. Centralization makes more efficient things other than the
unit-work, things like aggregate tracking. These things are typically only of
concern to the organization doing the management and have almost nothing to do
with the goals of the party for whom the work is being done.

Take, for example, developing a website. Maybe it's a site for a small
municipality to post community updates. This work could be done by a small,
local consulting group or a gigantic, multi-national one. All else being
equal, the cost of the project will necessarily be higher with the large
consultancy than with the small.

And experience bears this out. I've been in both large and small
consultancies, and the only difference was how many layers of management were
on top of the decision process. There is no "economy of scale" for developing
to a customer's needs. And there is nothing in the management overhead of the
giganto-corp that improves the project for the customer. All that overhead has
to get paid for in some way, so it necessarily leads to higher project costs
(which probably means massive budget overruns because the big Corp probably
priced the project at or under the local Corp in order to close the deal).

Large, centralized systems become something like hedges for the management
org. They lose money on a long tail of small projects only to make it back
with more on a few, large winners that can be milked. We look at the bottom
line and say "everything is up! It must be good!", but we don't stop to look
at the individual failures. While, if it were all decentralized, we wouldn't
have a metric to look at to determine what direction the aggregate it going
on, but that long tail would probably be served a lot better.

