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Does anyone know if there are numbers somewhere for how much energy the different cloud providers use? Would be interesting to see which is more efficient from
by davedx 7y ago
Does anyone know if there are numbers somewhere for how much energy the different cloud providers use? Would be interesting to see which is more efficient from that perspective for those of us who care about such things. Energy per $ revenue or even better per compute would be helpful.
- bottled_poe 7y agoThe providers are already financially incentivised to minimise their power consumption. I’m not sure any change is needed. I suppose the power source might be relevant to the customer (eg. Coal vs hydro, etc).
- f_allwein 7y agoGoogle found this: https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-google-microsoft-green-clouds-and-hyperscale-data-centers/ https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-google-microsoft-green-cl...
- PunchTornado 7y agoso amazon the worst. google does quite well.
- tedunangst 7y agoHow effective are carbon credits at eliminating footprint? If company X runs an efficient datacenter with 80 GW wind and 20 GW coal power, and company Y runs a dumpy datacenter with 200 GW coal power, but company Y buys 200 credits, is company X still the one doing the most harm?
- barney54 7y agoIt's much more complex than this. You can't run a data center on wind. Data centers are all grid connected, so what really matters is the composition of generators on the grid (or at least the composition on the generators near the datacenter).
- dragonwriter 7y ago> It's much more complex than this. You can't run a data center on wind. You certainly could run on it on a dedicated combination of any mix of wind/solar/hydro power and stored (e.g., battery or regenerative fuel cell) power you wanted to. In practice, you'll probably want to connect it to the grid, but directed purchases on the grid, while they don't actually select which source really powers the DC, have all the practical effect of doing so.
- barney54 7y agoYou could do that, but no is no one powering their data center that way. They are all grid connected.
- sp332 7y agoFor now, company Y is probably doing better (purely from a CO2 emissions standpoint). But it's not sustainable, because some of those credits are from companies that just reduced their usage below some threshold. Most of the credits are not from "negative emissions" like planting trees. So as the thresholds decrease over time, there will be fewer credits available to buy and they will be stuck with either really expensive credits or a surplus of CO12 generation.
- gmueckl 7y agoThis needs to include the energy cost of data transmission to/from cloud data centers as well for a fair comparison. These server farms don't exist in isolation.
- adrianN 7y agoOnly if you assume that there are substantial differences in those costs between the different cloud providers.
- gmueckl 7y agoI'd say so. It makes a difference when you're doing things like hyping Google for using only renewable energy sources for their cloud data centers. OK, cool, but all the network infrastructure along the way doesn't. Only somewhat related, but I'm quite certain that on premise solutions would win over most cloud services if the energy cost of data transmission was factored in.
- pingyong 7y agoA cloud provider that specializes in compute will have vastly higher energy costs than a cloud provider that specializes in storage. Even without explicit specialization, it's not unreasonable to assume that the distribution of compute-heavy and storage-heavy customers is quite different between providers. So you'd have to sort of calculate that out. But if you do that, I'm not sure what would even differentiate them. They're all using essentially the same hardware. They all have the same cooling requirements. I wouldn't expect an average to be very interesting.
- OskarS 7y agoI agree it's rather strange to ask for who has the lowest energy usage when you're a cloud customer. "I want to rent this computer to do X, but it shouldn't consume any electricity" is not a reasonable demand. However: one could say that these companies are now big enough that it is reasonable to start demanding that these companies source the energy in a climate-friendly way. I think it's not at all unreasonable to demand that when Google or Amazon builds massive new data centers to be responsible about how those data centers are powered.
- Mirioron 7y agoI'm sure Google will have no problem providing a checkbox for you that will double your prices.
- killjoywashere 7y ago> I'm not sure what would even differentiate them Distance from carbon-neutrality per dollar of revenue sounds like a good start.
- pingyong 7y agoSure but that's going to mainly depend on where their energy comes from, not how much they use.
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoCarbon neutrality is a flawed statistic IMO and can be doctored with a lot - e.g. if Google pays a company X to plant an amount of trees, who's to say that neutralizes carbon? Keep it simple, just publish how much power they're using and what the sources are.
- estomagordo 7y agoEnergy usage and compute amount are company secrets that they simply won't discuss in the open.
- Spooky23 7y agoAll of these vendors will brag about their pue and energy sourcing. Nobody will tell you their electric bill, because it’s meaningless to you and meaningful to competitors. Google regularly brags about their facilities and you can find info with 30 seconds of research. AWS is a little more cagey, they will brief customers. Microsoft is more like Google.
- cowsandmilk 7y agoShould I expect ARM processors to be the most energy efficient for compute? Eg if I’m in AWS, should I be choosing graviton instances?
- ksec 7y agoThe answer seems to be yes for the latest Gravition2 according to initial benchmarks.
- wwn_se 7y agoGoogle is 100% renewable and is in my opinion the leader among the giants (AWS, Azure, Google, Ali) but there might be smaller companies that is even better. https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/our-biggest-renewable-energy-purchase-ever/ https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/...
- barney54 7y agoGoogle is not really 100% renewable in any meaningful sense. Google (and others) buy renewable energy, but that doesn't mean their purchases match up to what their data centers actually consume for the simple reason that data centers have a pretty consistent load and wind and solar do not produce electricity consistently. For truly progressive companies in this area, they need to consider matching the hourly generation and loads, not not just annualized generation and load: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/05/27/100-renewable-does-not-necessarily-mean-zero-carbon/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/05/27/100-renewable-does-not-...
- mhb 7y agoThis seems like an overly negative assessment. If Google can pay someone else to use solar during the day instead of coal surely we can give them credit for being 100% renewal. After all the opportunities to do this temporal shifting of renewables are exhausted, maybe then it's fair to level this criticism.
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoGoogle is on the list of companies working to remain carbon neutral. ...Microsoft is setting the goal of being carbon negative (since the inception of the company in 1975): https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-be-carbon-negative-by-2030/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-b...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]