How cloud computing impacts the environment
thecloud.christmas
thecloud.christmas
> 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.
It's "as it gets" that's doing the heavy lifting here.
For example, on a much smaller scale, before leds were so incredibly cheap, incandescent bulbs were more energy efficient overall than alternatives such as fluorescent lights for places that were rarely visited. Think cellars, attics, service closets ...
If we can efficiently extract uranium from saltwater, that value jumps to 60,000 years.
If instead we switch all reactors over to breeder types instead of the current light-water reactors, our 200-400 year estimate then becomes more like 30,000 years
In the longer term (hundreds of years), humanity should be worried exhausting non-renewable resources, but in a shorter perspective the climate change is a bigger concern.
These predictions also generally include a healthy amount of assuming growth of energy in the future, too, not just projecting today's use indefinitely (although not necessarily predicting exponential growth either).
This also ignores what I would consider fairly good odds of non-terrestrial sources we may find on that time frame. Plus I'm still holding out hope that one of our fusion approaches will eventually pay off. (Dyson spheres are nice & all but there's still something to be said for being able to generate power in concentrated manners where you want it, rather than having to collect it at scale from an uncontrolled reactor.)
[1] For the fashionably misanthropic among us who may feel that statement may contain too much optimism, "total civilization collapse" would be such a "critical change".
These regions are also really inexpensive due to this fact.
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)
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).
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.
I like that if it is true. I can't find anything specific on their report (1) - it is kinda vague: they say they're using renewable energy and are carbon-neutral in the same sentence, so not sure if that is just energy or the entire operation.
1 - https://sustainability.google/reports/environmental-report-2...
"100% renewables doesn't equal zero-carbon energy, and the difference is growing"
Bulb for example have more information about where their energy comes from: https://bulb.co.uk/energy/
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.
I don’t think we’re gonna get to a futuristic carbon neutral world without a hell of a lot of processing power
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.
They presumably can predict when they need to be turned on again, ready for use.
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?
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-...) - 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
And some countries are worse than others. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/10/asia/china-data-center-ca...
> 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?
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.
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.
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-... 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) 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.
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.
Why does this matter to software developers?
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.