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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 relevan

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. Imagine the amount of redundancy an organisation have to have to handle peak demand, vs a cloud provider aggregating the demands together. The graph is probably even more telling. With (assumed) increased need for technology going forward, we actually have almost static demand for energy due to these technologies. It's actually a good news! End of the day, yes technology is expected to consume more energy in the future, but in a good way, they will be somewhat aggregated to cloud. That means we can look into solutions targeted to cloud providers that actually have significant impact to the environment (eg. more incentives to use solar panels in cloud datacenter)

dijit 7y ago
The author makes the same argument; or at least points out there is truth to that argument.
sails 7y ago
> 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).
- mahic 7y ago
  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.

dijit 7y ago

The author makes the same argument; or at least points out there is truth to that argument.

sails 7y ago

> 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).

mahic 7y ago
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.