Since the 1960’s, we have measured the amount of carbon dioxide PPM (parts per million) in the atmosphere. In the graphs below, you can see that to this day, the levels are rising. There are several reasons for this, but in this blog, we’ll take a closer look at the emissions caused by cloud computing. How can we reduce these emissions and reduce costs on public cloud expenditures at the same time?
Source: NASA
More organizations are migrating their workloads to the cloud. For example, we do not need to spend money on running our own on-prem datacenter. The largest cloud provider, AWS, wrote an article in which they state cloud servers are more energy efficient, compared to on-prem servers. Running servers in the cloud can even reduce energy consumption up to 80 per cent.
A server running in the cloud is often underutilized, most servers are running in the idle state for 70-80 percent of the time that they are powered on. A server running idle still consumes 50-60 percent of the peak power consumption compared to when they are completely utilized. So, we can reduce power consumption of our cloud server while saving costs.
Below an example of a web server running in the AWS cloud. If we look at the performance metrics, we see that this server is running in the idle state for the majority of the day this server was active. This is visible in the picture below, the grey area in the picture corresponds to the idle state of the server. This means that most of the time this server is not doing much more than just consuming power.
By using Dynatrace’s Carbon Impact dashboard, we can see that this server has produced half a kilo of CO2 during the day. This while the web server was not doing much most of the time.
So, we have a web server that produces an unnecessary amount of CO2, and we have a server which is overprovisioned. This means we can use a smaller model virtual machine in our cloud, save some costs and reduce our carbon footprint.
Do you want to know if the servers used in your cloud environment are overprovisioned and what the corresponding CO2 output is? Send us a message and we will help you to get insights in your “Carbon Impact”, and find out how you can lower the Carbon Footprint of your organization while saving on your cloud costs.
