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> "traditional data centres"and "cloud data centres" There is no difference hardware-wise. The difference is our cloud overlords have been promoting "on-demand

> "traditional data centres"and "cloud data centres" There is no difference hardware-wise. The difference is our cloud overlords have been promoting "on-demand scaling" as a proof "serverless hosting" is superior to traditional ways because it's greener and "we can shutdown machines when there's no demands". Which is arguably true, but so short-sighted it hurts to think journalists will fall into this trap. > to the networking equipment and data centre servers Sorry i don't have the data at hand, but some people estimated just that. Internet infrastructure as a whole was estimated to use several percent of the world's electricity. Those numbers did not count resources/energy for production of the hardware or the infrastructure, only recurring "costs".

hughrr 5y ago
Actually I think it’s more that density is higher with the cloud. Although eu-west-1c ran out of nodes the other day so YMMV anyway.
jeffbee 5y ago
> There is no difference hardware-wise The difference between sophisticated (Google, Amazon, Facebook) cloud data centers and traditional corporate data centers is Extremely Large™. Traditional ones are characterized by things like big central UPS systems, redundant AC/DC power supplies in each host, remote-control PDUs, overblown air conditioners, etc. Cloud data centers are typified by non-redundant power supplies with either distributed UPS systems, or no UPS, DC-to-point-of-load, and marginal ventilation where the cold aisles are hotter than the hot aisles of traditional data centers. > Internet infrastructure as a whole was estimated to use several percent of the world's electricity Well, if you define "several" as "almost 2%" then yes, but mostly in traditional data centers. Moving to clouds improves this figure. It is estimated that half of global IT power consumption is in cooling and power delivery, meaning the industry as a whole has a PUE of 2.0, whereas Google, Facebook, and Amazon have PUEs of about 1.1. In other words, moving workloads to the cloud can save almost half of the power.

hughrr 5y ago

Actually I think it’s more that density is higher with the cloud. Although eu-west-1c ran out of nodes the other day so YMMV anyway.

jeffbee 5y ago

> There is no difference hardware-wise The difference between sophisticated (Google, Amazon, Facebook) cloud data centers and traditional corporate data centers is Extremely Large™. Traditional ones are characterized by things like big central UPS systems, redundant AC/DC power supplies in each host, remote-control PDUs, overblown air conditioners, etc. Cloud data centers are typified by non-redundant power supplies with either distributed UPS systems, or no UPS, DC-to-point-of-load, and marginal ventilation where the cold aisles are hotter than the hot aisles of traditional data centers. > Internet infrastructure as a whole was estimated to use several percent of the world's electricity Well, if you define "several" as "almost 2%" then yes, but mostly in traditional data centers. Moving to clouds improves this figure. It is estimated that half of global IT power consumption is in cooling and power delivery, meaning the industry as a whole has a PUE of 2.0, whereas Google, Facebook, and Amazon have PUEs of about 1.1. In other words, moving workloads to the cloud can save almost half of the power.