> I agree with the gist of this article, but I think if you are not a FAANG as the article suggests, then you probably also are not at a scale where your carbon impact is actually measurable...
It's not hard to have a startup that does use 100kW of servers and maybe about 150kW total-- HVAC, networking, UPS inefficiencies, etc.
There's about 450 grams of CO2 emissions per kilowatt-hour from typical electrical generation. Therefore this is about 600 tonnes of CO2-- not counting other lifecycle costs.
On the one hand, this is a tiny smidgen of overall CO2 emissions. On the other hand, this is about 80 households
worth of CO2 emissions.
As a developer, making this kind of thing 1% more efficient is the same magnitude as completely eliminating your home carbon footprint, and is a whole hell of a lot more plausible to do.
I know offsets are "cheap" at $10 per tonne or whatever as the article says. On the other hand, please don't really assume that buying $6k of offsets really does as much good as eliminating 600 tonnes of emissions for realsies.
A startup that cares at all about energy efficiency of compute will use a public cloud service. They don't have inefficient (or any) UPS, some of them don't even have traditional HVAC, their power overheads are only about 10% compared to 100-300% for standard corporate datacenters, and whatever fixed overhead they suffer is amortized over all their customers.
While public clouds do a great job at optimized hardware designs, they do an abysmal job of keeping all the CPU's and disks utilised.
A typical CPU in a cloud datacenter is maybe only 10% utilised. That's mostly due to unsold capacity and poor bin packing on many levels (user has an oversized kube cluster, the cloud provider has spare machines, etc.). Many cloud machines just sit idle for years on end because someone has forgotten about them. In many cases, those idle resources are not used for lower priority jobs either, since they are being paid for by a customer.
Not sure I can entirely agree. If you use for example a cloud machine service for your application (e.g. GCE) but you refer to a hosted database (Cloud Bigtable) then you are exploiting a service that is packed into the rest of Google's junk with very high utilization.
You could also skip the machine reservation and get better utilization by using GAE or similar.
> packed into the rest of Google's junk with very high utilization.
Maybe packed in with other public cloud things? I thought the partitioning between public and private resources was done at a pretty coarse level, but might misremember.
IMO more relevant is that Google public cloud resources are carbon neutral, at least wrt electricity. (Through buying green power and emissions credits, to the degree you believe the prices and the models I guess.)
The proper comparison isn't to how much utilization they could get if they were theoretically perfect. You need to compare to the realistic alternatives. If you are running your own servers, you are probably utilizing an even lower percentage most of the time.
Doesn’t matter that clouds are efficient. By design they have to be massively over-provisioned so they promote waste more than a startup that carefully allocates compute and lives within its bounds.
Bursting to 100k servers for 24 hours rather than properly engineering the code is a trade-off that frequently gets suggested now that the cloud is an option.
Yeah. And even ignoring over-provisioning, I'm pretty sure people would think twice about spinning up as many servers as they currently do if they were forced look at all the servers on a daily basis in front of them. The distance the fact that you don't actually coming across the hardware makes people feel a lot less guilty about running more servers.
A quick internet research reveals that the social cost per emitted ton of CO2 is most certainly much higher than $10.
Estimates are around $140-$180 with many being much higher.
It's not hard to have a startup that does use 100kW of servers and maybe about 150kW total-- HVAC, networking, UPS inefficiencies, etc.
There's about 450 grams of CO2 emissions per kilowatt-hour from typical electrical generation. Therefore this is about 600 tonnes of CO2-- not counting other lifecycle costs.
On the one hand, this is a tiny smidgen of overall CO2 emissions. On the other hand, this is about 80 households worth of CO2 emissions.
As a developer, making this kind of thing 1% more efficient is the same magnitude as completely eliminating your home carbon footprint, and is a whole hell of a lot more plausible to do.
I know offsets are "cheap" at $10 per tonne or whatever as the article says. On the other hand, please don't really assume that buying $6k of offsets really does as much good as eliminating 600 tonnes of emissions for realsies.