How green is your cloud?

Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

Thoughtworks

Careers, Business, 907234, Technology

4.7 • 53 Ratings

🗓️ 7 May 2021

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Following on from our Earth Day episode on green software engineering, we turn to the concept of Green Cloud. Reducing your IT operations’ carbon footprint is more complex than simply moving to the cloud. We explore how developers can gain insights into the energy usage of their cloud operations and the tools and techniques they can deploy to minimize their cloud-related emissions.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone. My name is Rebecca Parsons and I am one of your recurring hosts on the ThoughtWorks
0:10.7	Technology podcast. I'm joined by my co-hosts, Alexei.
0:16.0	Hello everyone. I'm Alexei Villasboas, one of the regular co-hosts, speaking from San Paolo.
0:21.6	Great to be here with you all.
0:23.6	And today we are talking with two of our colleagues who have just open-sourced a tool to help people understand the carbon footprint of their cloud.
0:33.6	So I would like to welcome Dan Lewis Tokly and Danielle Erickson to our podcast. Welcome, Dan.
0:43.7	Thanks, Rebecca. It's great to be here. And welcome Danielle. Thanks, Rebecca. Happy to be here.
0:50.3	Let's get started. Internally and externally, people are talking about green cloud. Well, what does that really mean? Is it just as simple as saying, I don't have to worry about it. I will let my cloud provider do it. Can you help us understand this concept a little bit?
1:07.8	Yeah. So we often hear from people that, you know, we're 100% on Google
1:14.0	Cloud or Microsoft Azure and they offset 100% of the energy powering their data centers. So
1:20.5	I'm already green, right? What do I have to do? Well, that's not quite the full story. So
1:26.3	the energy that powers hypers scale data centers,
1:29.2	like the major public cloud providers, is in no cases 100% renewable. In many cases, a very small
1:37.3	amount or no amount of renewable energy powering those data centers. And so carbon emissions are
1:42.3	still created in the first place when you're utilizing
1:45.0	their various services. Now, you know, those two cloud providers I mentioned do purchase
1:50.3	energy attributes to match that non-renewable energy in their data centers, but it doesn't
1:56.6	remove carbon from the atmosphere. It's already created in the first place. It's just a market-based
2:00.7	solution. And so as technologists and IT organizations, we have an opportunity or maybe your
2:08.8	responsibility to understand the carbon emissions that are created when we use all the various
2:14.0	services from cloud providers. But not only understand and start to measure, but to optimize our usage so you can reduce
2:21.0	the amount of energy and reduce the amount of carbon emissions associated with your usage.
	...

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