Moving From Heroku to the Clean Cloud
cleanweb.org.uk
cleanweb.org.uk
Seriously are you kidding me?
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.
> 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.
After all, ~41% of American power comes from coal according to Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Ge... ). And Coal is not something I would call clean by any stretch of the imagination.
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.
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''?
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.
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...