
How cloud computing impacts the environment - mikkelbd
https://thecloud.christmas/2019/15
======
nicolaslem
Disclaimer: former OVH employee

> Although many cloud providers have pledged to decarbonize their data
> centers, none have ditched fossil fuels entirely

Most datacenters in France are located close to nuclear power plants and only
run on fossil fuels in case of a prolonged power outage. To me this is as
carbon neutral as it gets.

~~~
cookie_monsta
I don't mean to nitpick, but wouldn't "as carbon neutral as it gets" be zero
reliance on fossil fuels, even for backup?

~~~
ovi256
>as it gets

It's "as it gets" that's doing the heavy lifting here.

~~~
cookie_monsta
Agreed. And "it" is the real workhorse - is "it" carbon neutrality or
datacenter power supply?

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telboon
While yes, datacenters will be a significant consumer of energy in the
foreseeable future, I honestly don't feel bringing "cloud" into the picture
gives relevance other than the buzzwords.

Like what the article actually says, cloud is basically datacenter hosted by
another guy. In fact, I would argue that cloud is more energy efficient due to
the shared infrastructure and higher efficiency due to the scale involved.
Imagine the amount of redundancy an organisation have to have to handle peak
demand, vs a cloud provider aggregating the demands together.

The graph is probably even more telling. With (assumed) increased need for
technology going forward, we actually have almost static demand for energy due
to these technologies. It's actually a good news!

End of the day, yes technology is expected to consume more energy in the
future, but in a good way, they will be somewhat aggregated to cloud. That
means we can look into solutions targeted to cloud providers that actually
have significant impact to the environment (eg. more incentives to use solar
panels in cloud datacenter)

~~~
sails
> cloud is basically datacenter hosted by another guy. In fact, I would argue
> that cloud is more energy efficient due to the shared infrastructure and
> higher efficiency due to the scale involved

While I agree with this, I think it is precisely because of this
commoditisation of cloud computing that we can have this conversation at all,
as we have only 3 (AWS, GCP, Azure) companies to look towards to give a very
accurate and measurable environmental impact of each CPU/TPU cycle or GB
stored/transferred.

Prior to this "cloud" movement, I'd argue it was too fragmented to measure,
other than as a cost of electricity.

My takeaway is that there are negative externalities to using computers beyond
the direct costs, and that it is a good time to take stock of these and
consider how to reduce them.

Edits:

From the article:

> However, there lies a responsibility on all of us developers as well to
> utilize libraries, coding techniques and compression algorithms which
> consume less storage and less energy. Mobile developers are well aware of
> the power restrictions due to batteries. It's time the rest of us follows
> and give their contribution to lowering data storage and processing for our
> workloads. The benefit? Reducing storage, memory and CPU for your workloads
> has an economic benefit - you pay less money to the cloud vendor. Win-win.

The issue will be in pushing an agenda that conflicts with the cloud providers
motives (revenue & profit).

~~~
mahic
Disclaimer: I'm the author of the article

I don't really believe the suggestions conflict with cloud provider motives.
If all cloud customers reduce their workload requirements, it's actually a win
for the cloud provider as well. Because they are then able to put more
customers on less hardware. Then they pay less money for electricity and pay
less money on hardware investments. This is just a repeat of the
virtualization / Dockerization of workloads, just on much higher scale.

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Darkskiez
Google at least claiming to buy 100% of their usage from renewable sources,
they are pretty open that it doesn't mean that is what feeds their electrons
at all times of the day though. Better than most traditional computing / on
premises sources though.

[https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/renewable/](https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/renewable/)

~~~
rb808
I buy 100% wind power at home, but its pretty much a scam I think. Of course
when there isn't any wind I get coal/gas/nuclear generated power. The 99% of
people who dont care dont care and its just a way to get some extra charge to
some people who try to be green. I keep doing it to try to send some signal
but might give up soon.

~~~
netsharc
I've wonderd about buying "eco power", it's not like electrons have markings
on them that say "I came from a generator attached to a wind turbine!". It's
just that the wind turbines put some Megawatts into the pool and their buyers
took the same amount of Megawatts.

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yoz-y
Ok but how about all the carbon removed by cloud computing? Less commutes
necessary thanks to video conferencing tools and work from home, less cars on
streets due do deliveries (disputable, depends on how the city is laid out I
suppose)...

~~~
sideshowb
Possibly less energy consumption for the same cloud service thanks to shared
hosting, on demand instances etc

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szczepano
Well more and more computing power in one place won't be carbon neutral. I
disagree with this article. It's like writing that 100 meter building can be
more efficient than 100 buildings. Yes it takes less space horizontally but
it's more complex to power it and support people then make 100 same buildings
and provide each with wind / solar power. That's what decentralisation is
about and maybe somewhere in future we start building self sustaining villages
with own small networks that barely need to communicate with outside world
instead of building giant networks that are inefficient. P2P FTW

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spodek
Low Tech Magazine's piece "Why We Need a Speed Limit for the Internet: The
energy use of the internet can only stop growing when energy sources run out,
unless we impose self-chosen limits."
[https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/10/can-the-
internet-r...](https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/10/can-the-internet-run-
on-renewable-energy.html) covers this situation from a systemic perspective,
realizing problems in meeting every energy need without considering
alternatives.

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Spooky23
When you consider the impact of "cloud computing", you need to consider the
offsets as well.

Enterprise datacenters have much higher PUEs than a hyperscale datacenter, and
the hyperscale folks have an incentive to use energy as efficiently as
possible. Hyper-scale datacenters often tend to be placed in locales where
space and access to electricity is better.

There is always alot of navel gazing about anything environmental, and it's
easy to throw rocks at what's new, because the facts are known and easy to
find. Ultimately, I don't think that what the author is suggesting that we all
do (ie. developing with an eye on efficiency) could meaningfully happen
without cloud computing, because the "old way" of making big capital purchases
for infrastructure is too disconnected from the operational costs.

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Havoc
Sure but I think in a way they’re a necessary evil.

I don’t think we’re gonna get to a futuristic carbon neutral world without a
hell of a lot of processing power

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shrubble
Since we don't know for sure what the capacity utilization of say AWS is, we
do not know if they are running physical servers which are lightly loaded or
not.

It might be that AWS runs a tight ship or it might be that they have entire
aisles of servers spun up but which run for only 1 hour per day.

~~~
Symbiote
I would think they would turn off computers they don't need, since that is a
huge saving on power and cooling.

They presumably can predict when they need to be turned on again, ready for
use.

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hereme888
Data centers are more efficient than people managing that same amount in their
own homes or office.

Also, "1%....might come from burning coal....if it did....it would result in
1.2 billion tonnes of CO2". "Might"? "If" it did? How is that unreal theory
useful to anyone?

~~~
mahic
Disclaimer: I'm the author of the article.

I'm not sure which part of it you believe is unreal, but I'll try to clarify;
\- the 1% electricity consumption of total world consumption is real - based
on research done by IEA ([https://www.iea.org/reports/tracking-buildings/data-
centres-...](https://www.iea.org/reports/tracking-buildings/data-centres-and-
data-transmission-networks)) \- The calculation on the effect of generating
200TWh of electricity from burning coal is 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2 emission
is real - the link in the article points to the estimation \- the fact that
most of world's energy comes from fossile sources is real. While it's not 100%
from coal, 67% is from fossile fuels;
[https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-
information-2019](https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-2019)

And some countries are worse than others.
[https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/10/asia/china-data-center-
ca...](https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/10/asia/china-data-center-carbon-
emissions-intl-hnk/index.html)

~~~
hereme888
Thanks for clarifying

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heisenbit
There is a lot of migration from smaller enterprise data centers to the cloud
which may be net positive.

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saagarjha
Reading the title, I was thinking this would be about cloud cover and not data
centers to be honest…

------
omgtehlion
proposed solutions:

> Increased energy efficiency on component level

> Increased energy efficiency on data center level

Why no “Increased efficiency on software level”? Is it simpler to throw
hardware (and money, energy, carbon emissions) at the problem than find better
solutions?

~~~
mahic
Disclaimer: I'm the author of the piece.

If you read the very last paragraph, I actually propose increased efficiency
on software level as a way to lower energy consumption. The two other
(component and data center level) are things us as developers usually have
little or no control over, they were merely used to illustrate that the
industry as a whole is working on the problem, and that you as a developer
actually can contribute.

~~~
omgtehlion
Thanks for clarification and for the article! First time I only skimmed over
headings and missed that part.

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seriesf
Here’s the number to keep in mind. A medium-sized cloud datacenter uses about
as much power as a single passenger airliner, but emits no carbon. That’s your
comparison.

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pier25
Would be great if cloud providers added how much energy a service/server/etc
is consuming and where that energy comes from in the dashboard.

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dangerface
This is dumb, the environmental impact is the same as any other electrical
appliance but we don't ask "What is the environmental impact of life support?"
because it doesn't matter.

The problem and solution have been clear for over a decade we all know it, we
need clean renewable electricity.

edit: I guess if you are releasing 12 articles a day they can't all be
insightful.

~~~
mahic
Disclaimer: I'm the author of the article

I'm sorry to hear that you didn't like the article. I believe there is a
fundamental difference between data centers and other electrical appliances
because data centers consume energy 24/7/365, while electrical appliances do
not.

It is a well known fact that electricity consumption from other sources, like
heating or cooling buildings is much larger in comparison. Or even data
networks and internet traffic in general;
[https://www.iea.org/reports/tracking-buildings/data-
centres-...](https://www.iea.org/reports/tracking-buildings/data-centres-and-
data-transmission-networks) And there is a lot to do in those fields as well.

Unfortunately, renewables to overtake fossile are far away. Even with the
development the last decade, wind and solar still count for only a fraction of
world production; [https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-
information-2019](https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-2019))
Until then, we as developers can actually make a small contribution by
offsetting getting the consumption from this particular source higher than it
is today, even if number of data centers is exponentially increasing.

Hope you found some of the other articles insightful.

~~~
dangerface
> because data centers consume energy 24/7/365, while electrical appliances do
> not.

But life support isn't? It really doesn't matter that its on 24/7, the source
of the energy is the problem not where its going.

In my country renewables are 50% of our electricity and growing.

The cost of installing a new windmill will be a lot cheaper than hiring a team
of coders to optimise a single piece of code. You also have the benefit of
solving the problem instead of the symptom. Again this is very dumb sorry.

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seriesf
A lot of people seem to cling to this number, 3-5 year lifecycle for servers.
But, much to the disappointment of software developers, machines in large
clouds are often in service for 8-10 years. When you build your own computers
there’s nobody to tell you that the warranty has ended, so you just leave them
in the rack as long as they are TCO-positive.

~~~
chefkoch
> But, much to the disappointment of software developers, machines in large
> clouds are often in service for 8-10 years.

Why does this matter to software developers?

~~~
seriesf
Because they can’t easily use AVX or whatever.

------
ollybee
I tried to share this link with someone on Facebook Messenger and it said it
could not be shared due to violating their community standards. Only thing I
can guess is it's something to do with the .christmas tld

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crocowhile
I once read the suggestion to build a powerful cloud datacenter in orbital
space, powering it with solar panels. That would solve any overheating problem
too.

~~~
dspillett
That would work for tasks that are not latency sensitive (i.e. long compute
tasks, not interactive ones) and that don't require oodles of bandwidth (or
aren't time sensitive so it doesn't matter that getting the data up there for
processing takes a while).

IIRC typical packet round trip times for generic networking a single satellite
is at least half a second, two or three times that being typical RTTs, and
bandwidth is going to be orders of magnitude lower than can be achieved with
land/sea wire based networks.

Also dissipating heat is more problematical in space than most people intuit
do to vacuum conditions.

And getting the kit up there in the first place will have a large
environmental impact, and upgrades will be somewhat more time consuming and
otherwise resource intensive.

