The warnings about climate change are clear; the imperative to adopt more sustainable business practices is widely understood. And yet business leaders — though fully onboard with the urgent need for sustainable business practices — remain unsure how to effectively deliver on their promises to reduce their carbon footprint.
Nowhere is this demonstrated more than in the cloud.
Cloud has rapidly become the dominant platform for enterprise technology. Many business executives instinctively understand the transformative potential of cloud, when it comes to flexibility, agility and scalability. But the environmental impact of moving to the cloud is far from clear.
Too often, business execs assume that by moving to the cloud they’re being green. After all, shifting from power-hungry, often decades-old, on-premises data centers to something new in the cloud should surely be better for the planet? What’s more, some of the biggest cloud providers claim carbon neutrality through renewable energy credits and powering newer facilities with renewables.
It’s an appealing vision. But the facts aren’t quite so simple. Yes, the cloud provider’s hyperscale infrastructure can be more energy efficient than on-premise data centers, but data centers account for ~1% of global energy use — and that figure is rising.
Here’s the thing: every workload that you move to the cloud uses energy. And some workloads are real energy hogs. One recent study showed that training a single machine learning model produced as much carbon emissions as 125 roundtrip flights from New York to Beijing.
And often, your dev teams will be unaware of the energy use of various workloads, unintentionally consuming more than necessary. Here’s where green cloud thinking comes in.
A green cloud strategy stresses the need for analysis and optimization so that you can understand the environmental impact of your cloud computing and curtail the cloud’s growing carbon footprint and energy demand.