Question and responses on low carbon cloud service

[adrianco]

What are the main considerations to take into account for building out a cloud service with the smallest possible carbon emissions footprint?

[adrianco]

Soopra: Building a cloud service with the smallest possible carbon emissions footprint involves several key considerations:

1. Energy Efficiency: Optimize your workloads so that they can run on fewer, more highly utilized instances. This not only reduces energy consumption but also the carbon footprint.

2. Location of Data Centers: Consider the energy mix of the location where your cloud service is hosted. Some regions rely more on renewable energy sources, resulting in lower carbon emissions.

3. Load Management: Prevent load peaks by spreading out or optimizing initialization code at startup, cron jobs, traffic spikes, or retry storms. This allows the system to run without problems at higher average loads, reducing energy use.

4. Use of Renewable Energy: Choose cloud providers that use renewable energy sources. While this might not be entirely in your control, you can influence it by expressing preference for greener options.

5. Carbon Accounting: Understand the difference between attributional and consequential carbon accounting. The goal should be to reduce the total carbon emitted for the planet, not just for your own workload.

6. Monitor and Improve: Continuously monitor your carbon footprint and look for ways to improve. Tools such as the Green Software Foundation's Standard Carbon Intensity (SCI) can provide valuable data for this.

Remember, every bit counts. Even small optimizations can lead to significant reductions in carbon emissions when scaled across large cloud services.