Cloud computing is obviously green and good for the environment. For example,
- Computing power located near green resources – hydroelectric power or other renewable resources like they have in Iceland.
- Elasticity - resources don’t have to sit around consuming power when underutilised and can be (virtually) spun up when required.
- Cloud Computing makes use of commodity resources, reducing wastage and helping ensure that hardware components are used as long as possible.
So when vendors pitch cloud computing today, it seems a good idea to ride the one thing that may be hyped more than cloud computing – climate change, green energy and related topics. An environmentally responsible organization may want to do as much as they can to be more energy efficient (or at least make use of renewable energy resources) and cloud computing looks, on the surface, to be a good candidate.
In assessing the viability of cloud computing, running the numbers about how green it actually is for a particular usage scenario becomes a little bit more complicated than ticking off the green credentials. That is because cloud computing encourages behaviour that may not be very green. Like a Prius driver that commutes 2 miles a day instead of walking – just because the Prius is green technology, how it is used and applied is more important.
I thought I would make up some potential non green side effects of cloud computing…
- Availability of cheap resources encourages poor optimisation – it is easier and cheaper to throw another cheap server at a process than to code and debug a highly optimised solution.
- Processing during peak times – because processors are available on demand, jobs that may have run at night can now be run any time, meaning that the energy required for processing is the most expensive and environmentally unfriendly.
- Over processing – Cloud Computing allows things that may never have been processed before to be processed without an impact on performance, for example, selecting a very large set of data for analysis because you can literally process the data in an hour where previously it could have taken days.
- Providing low value products and services – If cloud computing lowers the cost to provide services, it is possible to provide services that only generate a few pennies per transaction. While generally considered a benefit of the cloud, one has to question whether the value of the end product is worth its environmental cost.
- Insisting on low latency – A big part of the greenness of cloud computing is the availability of resources where energy is cheaper (and more sustainable), but an overzealous demand for low latency may mean that large data centres still need to be located in metropolitan areas where the environmental impact is high.
As we move from the ‘why’ in cloud computing to the ‘how’, claims about the green credentials of cloud computing need to to be clearly answered, motivated and calculated in order to substantiate the claims for a particular proposal. Reuven Cohen from Enomaly has recently started asking these sorts of questions and makes a call for supporting data of the environmental friendliness of cloud computing – and seemingly finding very little.
There is little doubt that some organizations can pull off very efficient (cloud) computing but I imagine that it is tough. The efficient use of computing resources goes beyond the physical data centre and extends to the application architectures and usage scenarios around a potentially limitless and cheap supply of computing resources. My interest is to try and understand the influence of environmentally friendly approaches to application architectures and whether or not it is relevant. We could, for example, look at our application architecture and structure it to offload some processing (where latency is acceptable) to the most environmentally efficient data centre at that moment in time – say on the other side of the world where the data centre is making use of off-peak overcapacity. Of course, in the spirit of cloud computing, this should be done transparently and in a zero touch manner.
As Google found out a year ago with the furore that erupted over the estimated carbon footprint of a Google search, people are concerned about their energy consumption (or at least aware). Perhaps, with ever increasing public awareness of climate change, those same concerns will be directed at organizations, where responsible use of energy will become expected. It is possible that a few years down the line that regulators will jump in and require audits and aggressive increase in data centre efficiencies. With the current initiatives in building out new cloud computing oriented platforms, it would be prudent to spare a thought for the environment – if not in the implementation of energy efficient processing, then at least in the ability to measure whether or not we are successful.
Then can we use cloud computing as a platform to bring about the radical change in energy usage that is required to protect future generations from our insatiable appetite for computing resources.
Simon Munro
@simonmunro