Is cloud green?
Cloud has been notoriously known to adversely impact environment while supporting sustainability efforts in some cases. An example being - Effectiveness of Solar energy generation is dampened by hovering clouds.
Coming to ‘Cloud’, that you and me relate to now, is also having a noteworthy impact on the planet.
Whether the impact is positive or adverse is something to look into.
Cloud adoption for more than a decade has been driven by key benefits including cost reduction, resource optimization, scalability and efficiency with reduced time-to-market. Not many have looked at it from sustainability perspective or the impact it has on environment and the planet.
Public cloud and sustainability
At a high level, researches have shown that adoption of public cloud reduces energy consumption, waste and carbon emission. Stats from these researches are available in published artefacts.
Cloud computing is definitely contributing towards reduction in enterprise carbon footprint in multiple ways -
Cloud Data centres
Hyperscale data centres of major cloud providers use energy efficient technologies using less energy more efficiently.
Physi-swap
Cloud enables replacing physical products and equipment with virtual ones. Example – use of audio and video streaming services as against use of CD/DVD/mpeg players.
This helps in reducing e-waste generation as well.
Reduced energy consumption
On-site data centres hog constant power supply for operations, cooling etc. With moving to cloud the hardware on premises is reduced and so is the power consumption and carbon emissions.
Studies predict a shift of commonly used applications to cloud can cut this consumption to as high as 80%.
Recommended by LinkedIn
Decreased greenhouse gases
Looking beyond just the data centre runtime operations, greenhouse gases are produced through entire lifecycle of an on-site data center. Producing raw materials, equipment manufacture, transportation, and even end-of-lifecycle activities contribute to overall emissions.
Not eliminating completely, cloud definitely contributes to reduction of greenhouse gases
Several indirect impacts include those from going paperless(using secure cloud storage instead of paper documentation), and also, remote working enabled by cloud services which indirectly reduces emissions through reduced travel, office workplace utilization etc.
BUT
With all the gains and benefits there’s still lots to be done to meet the sustainability targets (Paris Climate Agreement).
Even with cloud adoption, contribution of cloud and data centres to overall carbon emission is increasing. As per a report it is almost equivalent to aviation industry.
Things have to be looked beyond than just transitioning to cloud. Conscious efforts have to be made to have more efficient and optimized solutions.
Efforts towards reducing carbon emissions will bring benefits for all stakeholders.
Things don’t stop at selection of ‘the best’ cloud provider. There are several draggers which continue to adversely impact costs, energy consumption and carbon foot print.
Some of these include –
As a next step we can look at ways to make our cloud adoption effort ‘greener’.
Point to ponder – AI, ML, Blockchain, NLP models etc. are computational and energy intensive technologies. Improper use of energy intensive algorithms can negate the benefits otherwise derived from cloud adoption.
Interesting article Nitin! I have been seeing this topic off-late and indeed a good area to ponder over and contribute to the cause. An obvious justification comes to my mind: enterprises do not do a great job with respect to EOL management of the assets whereas it is expected that public cloud service providers (hyperscalers) will always try to keep their assets current by retiring EOL assets promptly. Given the fact latest hardware assets are designed with energy efficiency in mind, I would assume a greener outcome as a by-product. At the same time another counter question comes to my mind - 'How do you manage the retiring of assets in a green way? There are regulations to govern but who is watching / tracking the net positives or negatives'
Tech teams across organizations ae making consious effort to educate developers with best practices for using optimized algorithms, resources and SaaS offerings which makes the code execution efficient with reduced carbon footprint. Also, there are tools and services available for getting sustainability matrix and carbon footprint calculation/estimation.