How green is your cloud?

Rebecca Parsons:

Hello everyone. My name is Rebecca Parsons and I am one of your recurring hosts on the ThoughtWorks technology podcast. I'm joined by my cohost Alexey.

Alexey Boas:

Hello everyone, I'm Alexey Villas Boas, one of the regular co-hosts speaking from San Paulo. Great to be here with you all.

Rebecca:

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. So I would like to welcome Dan Lewis-Toakley and Danielle Erickson to our podcast. Welcome Dan.

Dan Lewis-Toakley:

Thanks Rebecca, it's great to be here.

Rebecca:

And welcome Danielle.

Danielle Erikson:

Thanks Rebecca, happy to be here.

Rebecca:

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?

Dan:

Yeah, so we often hear from people that we're 100% on Google cloud or Microsoft Azure, and they offset 100% of the energy power in their data centers so I'm already green, right? What do I have to do? Well, that's not quite the full story. So the energy that powers hyperscale data centers, like the major public cloud providers, is in no case 100% renewable. And in many cases, a very small amount or no amount of renewable energy power in those data centers. And so carbon emissions are still created in the first place when you are utilizing their various services.

Dan:

Now those two cloud providers I mentioned do purchase energy attributes to match that non-renewable energy in their data centers, but it doesn't remove carbon from the atmosphere, it's already created in the first place. It's just a market based solution. And so as technologists and IT organizations, we have an opportunity or maybe a responsibility to understand the carbon emissions that are created when we use all the various services from cloud providers to not only understand and start to measure, but to optimize our usage. So you can reduce the amount of energy and reduce the amount of carbon emissions associated with your usage.

Dan:

Some examples of that could be as simple as maybe moving a compute workload from a dirtier region to a more renewable region. Another example could be maybe you have a large amount of storage in an Amazon S3 bucket that's readily available, but you haven't used it for years and you don't have plans to utilize that data. So you might as well move it to Amazon Glacier, which it might take half an hour for you to access that data, but it's far more energy efficient and less carbon emissions associated with it.

Dan:

Another common example is you might have a large number of virtual CPU's deployed in a cloud provider but with very low utilization rate, maybe 10, 15%. If you can reduce the amount of virtual CPU's but increase the utilization rate, that will lead to far less energy produced and emissions created in the first place. So there are many opportunities for developers and engineers to find ways to quantify and then reduce carbon emissions.

Danielle:

Yeah, I guess I would say another piece of what we talk about green cloud is trying to not only think about your cloud in terms of cost and what's actually running, but monitoring it ongoing for these improvements for carbon emissions. A lot of people do look at optimizing for cost as an ongoing thing and monitoring for that, but we also want to do that for your emissions as well. So looking over time to see if there's spikes or see if things are going down and you have actually made improvements. So that's one big piece of green cloud.

Dan:

There's an interesting relationship between cost and carbon emissions. And it's often a good proxy if you reduce your costs, you can also reduce emissions, but it's not always the case. One example I like to share is that let's say you have terabytes of data stored in a region in Australia where I'm from, which is not the most renewable region for cloud providers, and you want to move that to maybe let's say Belgium, a region in Belgium that is far more renewable.

Dan:

From an environmental sustainability perspective, that's a win. It's a really good win. However, most public cloud providers have significant egress costs of moving data from one location to another. And so while it might make sense from a green cloud perspective, it might not make sense when it comes to cost. So it's all about thinking about these trade offs and factoring in carbon emissions or sustainability metrics alongside other cross functional requirements like cost or performance or security, because it's not always true. Our goal is to try and find the sweet spot where we can reduce costs and reduce emissions.

Rebecca:

Well, and that I think brings us nicely to the next thing I really wanted to talk about is this open source tool that your group has created to really help people understand the carbon footprint. And if we can't just use cost as a simple proxy, we need to understand that footprint in a very different level. So can you tell me a little bit about this tool and why it was developed in the first place?

Danielle:

Yeah, so we kind of realized that there was this bit of a gap in the understanding of our technology and specifically the cloud and our carbon emissions, our carbon impact. So we wanted to see what was possible. We did a little bit of research and there's a few things out there. One thing in particular is these Cloud Jewels, it's a methodology that allows you to, what they did is they calculated their energy usage for GCP, Google cloud.

Danielle:

But we wanted to see if we could actually take this and build something that developers could use in practice. So we did a little bit of a proof of concept to see what was possible, especially to get a picture of emissions for organizations that are multi-cloud users. So you can really see what's happening across the board. And that way developers in their day to day, we wanted to create a tool that would allow developers and technologists in their day to day to see the impact their choices are making. We wanted to allow developers and technologists to get a full picture of their cloud carbon emissions, especially if they're using multiple clouds and also to be able to see that over time and monitor it with the changes they're making as they go throughout their day to day.

Danielle:

So we heard that this is something that not only is important as we all know for climate change, but it's something that does motivate people. Developers are more motivated to work on sustainability related improvements as opposed to cost related improvements. So building a tool that would help them do that is something we wanted to try to do. And then on top of that, we really wanted to build something open source so that it can be customizable and extensible for a variety of different organizations of different sizes, of different cloud providers. And just being able to cater that to your specific needs. So that's the inspiration of the tool and the story of how we got to the specific solution we came to.

Alexey:

Well that's amazing, it really helps developers shift their mindset and look at carbon emissions and energy efficiency as a separate across functional requirement and then bring that into the day-to-day of development monitoring, just the way we do with several other things at the end of the day. I'm really curious to delve a bit deeper into the details of how the tool works and then what's the methodology and the estimation. So Dan you did mention that cost is a good proxy for energy efficiency, but not exactly that. And Danielle, you did talk about that Etsy Cloud Jewels. Can you explain a little bit about the methodology, how we look at that and how is it different from just performance in a more abstract way?

Danielle:

Yeah so as an overview, the tool works on a pretty simple calculation to estimate your emissions. So first we take usage data from the different public cloud providers. Then we'll classify it into different types, so compute, storage, networking. And then we do have a section where it's a bit unknown. Some of the usage types are less easy to identify at this point. So once we have that compute, storage and networking classification, we can then convert it to energy. And then from energy, using public grid factors, we convert it to emissions. So that's how we get the number of carbon emissions for your cloud use at a high level.

Dan:

Just to do a bit of a double click into it, the tool currently supports Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, and the data source is the cost and usage or billing data around those cloud providers. So for AWS, we use Amazon Athena to query the cost of usage reports to get all those types of usage rows that Danielle has broken down. With Google cloud we use Big Query to create the billing export table. And then with Microsoft Azure, they have an API called the consumption management API that we pulled. And the data types and the values and the units are different across all of them, but we get, with a bit of data transformation and understanding those data sources, we can get them in a format that allows us to classify them as Danielle said, as compute, storage or networking.

Dan:

We haven't added memory yet to the estimation, we're researching and trying to find a way to quantify memory in terms of energy, that's on the short term roadmap. And then there's also some usage rows that are either unknown or unsupported. For example, a license fee, unlikely to have any actual energy usage associated with a fee. We would say that is unsupported. As Danielle said earlier, we leverage Etsy's Cloud Jewels methodology that they published last year, but we've updated and improved coefficients based on additional research. And we also applied that to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as well. So it's not just Google Cloud.

Dan:

For compute, one way that we've improved the coefficients is that the min and max watts that are produced at either zero or 100% CPU utilization, we're dynamically determining what those coefficients are based on the underlying micro architecture for the instance type that you have selected. So what that means is that all three of the public cloud providers publish a list of all the instances that you can select. And alongside that, they publish the micro architectures that are used. In some cases, it's a single micro architecture, such as Intel Haswell. Other times it's a group of micro architectures. And so when it's a group, when we don't quite know exactly what it is, we take the average and apply that as the coefficients.

Dan:

So that's a little bit more details on how we determine energy estimations per compute. And then for storage, it's very similar to Etsy's Cloud Jewels, but we've just updated it to be 2020 and 2021 relevant coefficients. Basically, given an amount of terabytes of storage provision, we can estimate that it's X amount of energy associated with it. One interesting thing with storage is that we look at the storage amount provisioned, not the storage amount utilized. So you might have let's say an EBS volume with AWS that has 20 gigabytes of storage provision, but you're only using two gigabytes. We look at the 20 view, because that's what we expect the energy is being utilized to power that storage device. So something to think about.

Dan:

The one additional interesting thing about storage is that oftentimes in some cloud providers, if you deploy provisions from storage, it automatically by default also provisions at multiple different availability zones, and so we're looking into what that can mean in terms of energy associated with it. And you might've only provisioned 10 gigabytes, but there might actually be energy associated with 30 gigabytes if it's available across multiple availability zones. So that's something that we're also looking into.

Dan:

When it comes to networking, over the years, there's been many studies and academic papers that try to determine a coefficient for a given amount of data transfer and what that means in terms of energy. There's been a high variance in those coefficients with some articles saying it's quite high, some quite low, but overall the trend has been steadily downwards over the last decade or so. And so we've made some assumptions about hyperscale data centers in that because of the way they've architectured their networks, they likely have the most energy efficient transfer between data centers at the highest speed rate possible.

Dan:

And so we looked at all of those studies and decided to use the lowest coefficient available under that assumption. And with all of this methodology, we very much so welcomed feedback and contributions because there are a number of assumptions that we make going into it. So once we have energy, then we take into account the power usage effectiveness of the cloud providers. So power usage effectiveness is basically figured that is how efficient is that data center. And it's the ratio of the total energy required to power the entire data center over the energy required to provide the services. So for example, lighting lights in a database provided services to the customers.

Alexey:

Yeah so intuitively, it's trying to capture the building, the energy necessary for the building. So lights, fans, ventilation systems, all those kinds of things that go beyond the computer itself, right? Is that intuitively what the effectiveness is trying to capture?

Dan:

Yeah, that's a good summary Alexey, and we use publicly available information. Google Cloud actually published their trailing 12 month PUE values from 12 months ago. And they do that every quarter, which is great. And we haven't got a statement from the Microsoft Azure team as to their PUE, and with Amazon Web Services we use reasonable default based on public articles that they've published in the past. So yeah, it's definitely what you say Alexey, it takes into account all of the energy required for the data center.

Dan:

Then finally we use publicly available emissions factors, as Danielle said, to convert that energy into carbon emissions in a carbon dioxide equivalent. In the US we use the EPA's figures that they report on a regional level. Outside the US, the EA in Europe. There's also ... Carbonfootprint.com produce a report every quarter.

Dan:

In the case of Google Cloud, however, they recently published their regional grid emissions factors on their website publicly. In the case of Google Cloud, we're able to use the figures that they'd actually published and set at the emissions factors for their data centers.

Alexey:

Amazing. Thanks for sharing. I find it amazing to realize how different it actually is from, just, performance, and then the amount of complexity that exists on top of that. The energy efficiency of a data center is an interesting one to me, because it, as developers, forces us to think beyond the thing we're building and the resources we're directly using.

Alexey:

One similar conversation that we had that I found quite eye opening, at least for me, was ... We were discussing energy efficiency of algorithms, and we have a separate episode on that. At some point we were discussing, "Yeah, but when considering energy efficiency, you have to think about, how many times do you build your packages, and how many times have you deployed it?" Because all of that is consuming energy. That's part of the whole account for energy efficiency.

Alexey:

Whereas when we think about performance, all that is free, and we're just focusing on how fast the algorithm runs, for example, when the program runs at the end of the day. It's quite fascinating. We have to look much broadly than we usually do when developing applications. I find it quite fascinating.

Rebecca:

Here I am, I'm a developer, and I am working in an organization that is taking sustainability seriously. I have this tool that you've made available to help me understand these emissions. Now that I have a more nuanced understanding of the relationships, how does carbon get used? How as a developer would I use your tool to help me in my day-to-day work?

Danielle:

Yeah. The first step would be to connect to each one of your cloud providers. The nice thing about the tool is that it gives you a place to see all of these in one place. Previously there really wasn't, at least to our knowledge, a way to see everything in one spot.

Danielle:

I think that's one of the ways that this tool can be really helpful, because you can see everything in a unified view at one time, or you can break it out and compare. Say you want to compare your GCP usage to your AWS usage and see what that looks like. You can do that with the tool and view one at a time. You can also drill down and look at particular accounts or particular services and see that your EC2 usage is absolutely enormous, but other usages are less. Or certain accounts are really causing a lot of emissions, or your cost is really high for certain amounts, and you can compare that to your other accounts.

Danielle:

With that view of being able to compare, contrast, and see everything in one place, we're hoping that, in the day to day, that'll help you. You can keep that in mind and you can make decisions based on ... when you're working on these things. We really hope that it's data that can help you take action.

Danielle:

Then, additionally, on top of that, what we've been talking about, to this point, is helping you get a holistic picture. That holistic picture is something that we've heard from a lot of organizations that would be really the most helpful overall.

Danielle:

However, if you do want to get more fine-grain detail, or a little bit more deep dive into your carbon emissions for a specific service or specific accounts, we do have the opportunity in the tool to switch the approach a little bit. Instead of using the billing data, we can hit service APIs. In that calculation, we use the actual CPU utilization. We can get that back from the API and then use that in the calculation. It's a much more accurate snapshot in time of your carbon emissions.

Dan:

I might also add that the repository is a TypeScript monorepo with a number of different packages. We decided to go in that direction because we're still learning about the different ways in which individuals or organizations might want to use the software.

Dan:

You might want to use the client-side dashboard with the data visualization and the charts that we've built in the client package. But maybe, as a developer, you've already got your own database tooling, and you just want to deploy the API maybe in a Docker container that we provided, and have that data served up in different places for your usage.

Dan:

We also have a command line application, if you just want to run it by a command line and get the data maybe shown as a table. Or you can just save it to a CSV file, if you then want to import that into other places. We've tried to provide flexibility and options for developers, because we know there's different use cases, and we want to try and support as many as we can.

Rebecca:

What's next? What are some of the other things that are on the roadmap for this tool? Because I feel this is quite empowering to me as a technologist to be able to understand, based on the work that I do, what kind of impact am I having on the planet? You've got a lot there already. What's next?

Danielle:

Yeah. Looking into the future, I think there's a lot of opportunity for this tool. Like you said, having that picture of the emissions that you're causing really can be empowering for developers, but we hope that this tool can become a little bit more than that, and really be an enabler. We'd like to eventually build in as many recommendations that we can to help you optimize your Cloud use.

Danielle:

Some of the things Dan mentioned previously we'd like to build into the tool, so you get suggestions of ways you can shift things around, or maybe you can see a projection of what the future might look like if you make certain changes. All of that is a possibility, and something we would like to explore in the future.

Danielle:

Then I think, in addition, in our effort to make this applicable to as many users and organizations as possible, we'd like to add in additional cloud providers and support more usage types and different services, so keep just expanding the things that we already have so that it fits whatever needs different organizations have.

Dan:

One thing I'm particularly excited about for the medium and longer-term roadmap is that, if we can have a mechanism for users of the software to optionally opt in to sending some of their energy and carbon emissions to, maybe, some sort of centralized data source data location, maybe with some additional anonymous data like the size of the company, or the industry, or the size of the IT organization, we can actually start to understand trends across industries and across organizations, and start to maybe get a picture of, what does good look like when it comes to Green Cloud in my organization's eyes and my end type? What does not so good look like? 

Dan:

And I would love a future where I, as a developer, can log into my Green Cloud portal and hook up my cloud providers and instantly see what maybe my Green Cloud score is based on all those other data types. And then have a list of things and recommendations that I can do to improve that. And through that process, set some standards about what Green Cloud best practices looks like. Because right now the data is not even super available, but the future could hold a lot of potential for that sort of direction.

Danielle:

And then building off of that, if we are able to have these types of metrics and standards and ways to measure how we're doing, think there's an opportunity to have this as the default way of thinking as we develop software and technology. So it's something that is a cross-functional requirement that is similar to the way we think about security performance and other things.

Dan:

One final thing to add for the longer term road map is, if there's some way that we can build in these energy and carbon emission metrics as part of our CICD pipelines and have developers getting early warnings about you find deploying this code or these instances, then what does that mean in terms of my energy and carbon emissions in a more automated way? We need to think through how that can actually work practically, but definitely there is a desire for it to have early warning, or triggers, or gateways maybe, before you have to [inaudible 00:25:55] step in the CICD pipeline, so you see don't a huge spike and then have to pick something at a later date that can model that and prevent it happening before it does.

Danielle:

And additionally, if there's ways to build this in other ways, like maybe you can get opinion slack when you have high usage going through your pipeline, or maybe you can have tests around it. So you know even before you push things and possibly even, I think we mentioned before, if there's existing dev portals, you see that as you're going through your day to day development. So carbon is always in your face. It's always there. You're always thinking about it.

Rebecca:

So Dan, you mentioned earlier that you're anxious for feedback and for getting people involved. As a developer, or as a technology practitioner, how can I get involved? What kinds of help would you like? What would you like me, leaving this, listening to this podcast, being excited about doing next?

Dan:

Well, I think that the best place to start is to go to cloudcarbonfootprint.org. We have a website there that has all the information you need to get started with the tool. And I think we would just, as a starting point, love developers to look at the documentation, check out the code base and give it a rough try and try out the tool and through that process give us feedback. We really want this tool to be a community driven effort where lots of feedback is happening and members of the community are helping shape the direction of where we go next.

Dan:

So we very much so welcomed forks of the repository and pull requests. It's still early days. We only launched it last week, so it's still small, but we're hoping it builds over time. Also with the website, we've got a Google group, a discussion forum that you can join if you have questions or need support. Or if you want to help contribute and shape the roadmap, you could also send an email to that group and be part of the group. Danielle, did I miss anything?

Danielle:

I guess the other thing is, if you're interested in working a little bit more closely with us and providing feedback, you're also welcome to reach out on that front. We have in the past, worked closely with organizations to look at their individual usage. And through that understanding, for different organizations, what this tool could be, or how we could shape things. So that's an option too.

Rebecca:

Well, thank you so much, Dan. Thank you, Danielle, for talking with us today about Green Cloud and the carbon footprint tool. And we hope that this provides a mechanism for technologists to introduce aspects of sustainability into their day-to-day work, which is ultimately what we all have to do to make a difference overall. To make the world as a whole, a more sustainable place. And thank you, Alexey, for joining me and thank you all for listening to the ThoughtWorks Technology podcast.