Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How cloud computing impacts the environment

thecloud.christmas

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 67 posts

Re: How cloud computing impacts the environment

#51

Post by Spooky23 »

When you consider the impact of "cloud computing", you need to consider the offsets as well.

Enterprise datacenters have much higher PUEs than a hyperscale datacenter, and the hyperscale folks have an incentive to use energy as efficiently as possible. Hyper-scale datacenters often tend to be placed in locales where space and access to electricity is better.

There is always alot of navel gazing about anything environmental, and it's easy to throw rocks at what's new, because the facts are known and easy to find. Ultimately, I don't think that what the author is suggesting that we all do (ie. developing with an eye on efficiency) could meaningfully happen without cloud computing, because the "old way" of making big capital purchases for infrastructure is too disconnected from the operational costs.

Re: How cloud computing impacts the environment

#52

Post by chefkoch »

seriesf wrote: post #47

A lot of people seem to cling to this number, 3-5 year lifecycle for servers. But, much to the disappointment of software developers, machines in large clouds are often in service for 8-10 years. When you build your own computers there’s nobody to tell you that the warranty has ended, so you just leave them in the rack as long as they are TCO-positive.

> But, much to the disappointment of software developers, machines in large clouds are often in service for 8-10 years.

Why does this matter to software developers?

Re: How cloud computing impacts the environment

#53

Post by sails »

telboon wrote: post #3

While yes, datacenters will be a significant consumer of energy in the foreseeable future, I honestly don't feel bringing "cloud" into the picture gives relevance other than the buzzwords. Like what the article actually says, cloud is basically datacenter hosted by another guy. In fact, I would argue that cloud is more energy efficient due to the shared infrastructure and higher efficiency due to the scale involved.…

> cloud is basically datacenter hosted by another guy. In fact, I would argue that cloud is more energy efficient due to the shared infrastructure and higher efficiency due to the scale involved

While I agree with this, I think it is precisely because of this commoditisation of cloud computing that we can have this conversation at all, as we have only 3 (AWS, GCP, Azure) companies to look towards to give a very accurate and measurable environmental impact of each CPU/TPU cycle or GB stored/transferred.

Prior to this "cloud" movement, I'd argue it was too fragmented to measure, other than as a cost of electricity.

My takeaway is that there are negative externalities to using computers beyond the direct costs, and that it is a good time to take stock of these and consider how to reduce them.

Edits:

From the article:

> However, there lies a responsibility on all of us developers as well to utilize libraries, coding techniques and compression algorithms which consume less storage and less energy. Mobile developers are well aware of the power restrictions due to batteries. It's time the rest of us follows and give their contribution to lowering data storage and processing for our workloads. The benefit? Reducing storage, memory and CPU for your workloads has an economic benefit - you pay less money to the cloud vendor. Win-win.

The issue will be in pushing an agenda that conflicts with the cloud providers motives (revenue & profit).

Re: How cloud computing impacts the environment

#54

Post by seriesf »

chefkoch wrote: post #52
seriesf wrote: post #47

A lot of people seem to cling to this number, 3-5 year lifecycle for servers. But, much to the disappointment of software developers, machines in large clouds are often in service for 8-10 years. When you build your own computers there’s nobody to tell you that the warranty has ended, so you just leave them in the rack as long as they are TCO-positive.

> But, much to the disappointment of software developers, machines in large clouds are often in service for 8-10 years. Why does this matter to software developers?

Because they can’t easily use AVX or whatever.

Re: How cloud computing impacts the environment

#57

Post by Symbiote »

rb808 wrote: post #37
Darkskiez wrote: post #7

Google at least claiming to buy 100% of their usage from renewable sources, they are pretty open that it doesn't mean that is what feeds their electrons at all times of the day though. Better than most traditional computing / on premises sources though. https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/renewable/

I buy 100% wind power at home, but its pretty much a scam I think. Of course when there isn't any wind I get coal/gas/nuclear generated power. The 99% of people who dont care dont care and its just a way to get some extra charge to some people who try to be green. I keep doing it to try to send some signal but might give up soon.

The whole point is to send that signal, increasing demand for wind power, and increasing the budget for the company so they can invest in new turbines.

Re: How cloud computing impacts the environment

#58

Post by Symbiote »

shrubble wrote: post #42

Since we don't know for sure what the capacity utilization of say AWS is, we do not know if they are running physical servers which are lightly loaded or not. It might be that AWS runs a tight ship or it might be that they have entire aisles of servers spun up but which run for only 1 hour per day.

I would think they would turn off computers they don't need, since that is a huge saving on power and cooling.

They presumably can predict when they need to be turned on again, ready for use.

Re: How cloud computing impacts the environment

#59

Post by jeanregisser »

alex_young wrote: post #48
nicolaslem wrote: post #5

Disclaimer: former OVH employee > Although many cloud providers have pledged to decarbonize their data centers, none have ditched fossil fuels entirely Most datacenters in France are located close to nuclear power plants and only run on fossil fuels in case of a prolonged power outage. To me this is as carbon neutral as it gets.

If you run your workloads in AWS us-west-2 or GCP us-west1 you're running on hydroelectric energy produced at the Columbia River. These regions are also really inexpensive due to this fact.

Interesting thanks! Do you know about other locations like us-central1 for instance?

Re: How cloud computing impacts the environment

#60

Post by mahic »

sails wrote: post #53
telboon wrote: post #3

While yes, datacenters will be a significant consumer of energy in the foreseeable future, I honestly don't feel bringing "cloud" into the picture gives relevance other than the buzzwords. Like what the article actually says, cloud is basically datacenter hosted by another guy. In fact, I would argue that cloud is more energy efficient due to the shared infrastructure and higher efficiency due to the scale involved.…

> cloud is basically datacenter hosted by another guy. In fact, I would argue that cloud is more energy efficient due to the shared infrastructure and higher efficiency due to the scale involved While I agree with this, I think it is precisely because of this commoditisation of cloud computing that we can have this conversation at all, as we have only 3 (AWS, GCP, Azure) companies to look towards to give a very accur…

Disclaimer: I'm the author of the article

I don't really believe the suggestions conflict with cloud provider motives. If all cloud customers reduce their workload requirements, it's actually a win for the cloud provider as well. Because they are then able to put more customers on less hardware. Then they pay less money for electricity and pay less money on hardware investments. This is just a repeat of the virtualization / Dockerization of workloads, just on much higher scale.

Post reply on HN