
Moving From Heroku to the Clean Cloud - jason_neylon
http://www.cleanweb.org.uk/blog/2013/04/21/moving-from-heroku-to-the-clean-cloud/
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Goranek
After the line "it runs on top of Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform which
means it is powered by dirty CO2 spurting coal power plants" i stopped
reading..

Seriously are you kidding me?

~~~
ultimoo
Why do you dismiss this? I didn't investigate into it, but does Amazon not run
its infrastructure on coal power?

Anyway, if Amazon does, then what the OP did was justified in their own
ideals. While most of us do not think in this direction while hosting a
webapp, there are some organizations and companies who have made being eco-
friendly as one of their pillars. Let's be respectful of everyone's motives
and ambitions.

~~~
Maxious
> AWS and Sustainable Energy <http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/sustainable-
> energy/>

> Many AWS customers have workloads with latency requirements that require
> they be hosted near their customers. [...] we locate AWS datacenters in
> places that allow companies to get the latencies they require.

> __Both the Oregon and GovCloud Regions use 100% carbon-free power. __AWS
> customers who want to operate in a Region that uses 100% carbon-free power
> can select one of these two Regions. We will continue to work hard on our
> own, and alongside our power providers all over the world, to offer our
> services in an environmentally friendly way in all of our Regions.

So if latency is important to you, there's an AWS Region for that. If carbon-
free power is important to you (and maybe heroku could pass this through?),
there's an AWS Region for that.

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kristianp
Data center power consumption is a real issue and it makes sense that a
website for renewable energy projects will itself run 'green'. I for one,
upvoted this story, as I hope it raises awareness that, yes, the greenhouse
effect still exists, and fossil fuels are harmful to people.

Also, even though natural gas seems to be growing faster than coal in terms of
electricity generation, gas isn't green, it's just "greener" than coal.

~~~
koralatov
I agree with what you're saying, and I agree that there's a need to cut the
use of polluting power-sources to run data-centres, but I really, _really_
dislike the way it's being put across here.

Hyperbolic, emotionally charged phrasing like ``dirty CO2 spurting coal power
plants'' makes it far, far too easy for people to dismiss the author of the
piece as some sort of tree-hugging hippie wingnut with an agenda. What was
wrong with keeping it simple with something like, ``coal-fired power plants''?

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mcescalante
tl;dr You left Heroku because they run on EC2 which uses too much power in
your opinion, and bought a VPS from a green host and set up your own
webserver.

Seems to me a bit more like a statement about EC2 datacenter power consumption
relative to other large companies than actually migrating from Heroku to
another platform.

~~~
mrchrisadams
This isn't a post about using EC2 using too much power.

Energy and emissions aren't the same thing.

You can have an efficient datacentre that still emits CO2 because it's powered
by coal.

Conversely you can have a less efficient datacentre that runs on geothermal,
that will have vastly lower CO2 emissions.

If you want to decouple the nice things we talk about on here (PaaS, IaaS and
suchlike) from the bad things (climate change, pollution from burning tonnes
of coal etc. ), then finding away to generate power without releasing loads of
CO2 helps.

Tom Raftery has a nice slideshare outlining some of the issues here - if
you've made this far to read the comments, it's worth skimming over it.

[http://www.slideshare.net/TomRaftery/can-we-hack-open-
source...](http://www.slideshare.net/TomRaftery/can-we-hack-open-source-cloud-
platforms-to-help-reduce-emissions)

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LatvjuAvs
How dare Eskimos eat meat, they should eat bananas and fruit!

