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Is Cloud Computing Green yet?

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Clouds

Back in 2008 I wrote a post asking how Green is Cloud Computing?

Back then I didn’t really have an answer to the question. I mean logic would lead you to think that Cloud Computing leads to more efficiently run computers, so therefore it HAS to be Green, right? However, at the time, none of the Cloud providers were publishing their energy utilisation numbers, so no conclusions based on solid data could be drawn.

Fast forward from 2008 to now. How many Cloud providers are now publishing their energy utilisation info? Oh that’s right, none of them are.

There is a move by some Amazon shareholders calling on the company to prepare a report that will assess the impact of climate change on Amazon and make it public – but there is no guarantee that even if Amazon vote to do this, that they will include detailed energy consumption data.

One thing which might force this issue is a requirement for organisations to report emissions data – until that happens though, if the last three years is anything to go by, it doesn’t look like Cloud providers will be publishing their efficiency data any time soon.

What we need to see from Cloud providers is data in the form of watts/compute cycle so we can cross-compare their efficiency, and compare it to alternative infrastructures. This is something they have been singularly reluctant to report on to-date. One has to wonder why. Could it be that, in fact, Cloud Computing is hugely inefficient?

And even if Cloud Computing is shown to be more efficient, as Simon Wardley is fond of pointing out, Jevon’s Paradox, may mean that we end up using much more of a more efficient resource, paradoxically increasing energy consumption, which is definitely NOT Green.

So what do you think? Is Cloud Computing Green Yet? And if not, will it ever be?

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Photo credit supertin

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Just how green is cloud computing?

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Clouds

Photo credit tipiro

Cloud computing may not be as Green as you think.

I mentioned previously that I gave a keynote presentation at the Green IT Summit in Dublin last week.

In the question and answers session after the talk, Sean Baker asked about cloud computing and whether I thought companies using cloud computing weren’t simply outsourcing their emissions.

As Gordon Smith picked up in a piece for SiliconRepublic.com, I replied that I

was ?quite sceptical? about this issue. ?None of the cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft or IBM are publishing metrics at all. Intuitively you have to think that because you?re outsourcing that to someone of that scale that they?re being more efficient but we?ve no way of knowing. Frankly, that?s worrisome. I don?t know why they?re not publishing it and I wish they would,?

This is no sudden realisation on my part. In fact, I have been concerned about Cloud Computing’s Green credentials for some time now as you can see from a series of Tweets (here, here and here, for instance) I posted on this issue in early to mid 2009.

It is vital that cloud providers start publishing their energy metrics for a number of reasons. For one, it is a competitive differentiator. But perhaps more importantly, in the absence of any provider numbers, one has to start wondering if cloud computing is in fact Green at all.

IBM, for example, are not known for being shy when given an opportunity to talk up their Green initiatives. However, on cloud, they are conspicuously silent. The same is true for Amazon, Microsoft, SalesForce and Google.

I’m not sure why cloud providers are not publishing their energy metrics but if I had to guess I would say it is related to concerns around competitive intelligence. However this is not a sustainable position (if you’ll pardon the pun).

As the regulatory landscape around emissions reporting alters and as organisations RFP’s are tending to demand more details on emissions, cloud providers who refuse to provide energy-related numbers will find themselves increasingly marginalised.

So is cloud computing Green?

I put that question toSimon Wardley, cloud strategist for Canonical in this video I recorded with him last year and he said no, cloud computing is very definitely not Green.

To be honest, until cloud providers start becoming more transparent around their utilisation and consumption numbers there is really no way of knowing whether cloud computing is in any way Green at all.

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Simon Wardley at the it@cork Green IT Conference

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Simon Wardley is a geneticist with a love of mathematics and a fascination in economics. Simon has always found himself dealing with complex systems, whether it’s in the behavioural patterns of ladybirds to modelling environmental risks of chemical pollution to developing novel computer systems to managing companies.

In this talk at the it@cork Green IT conference, Simon gives a superb whistlestop talk on the topics of commoditisation, utility computing, Green IT and ducks (!).

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How Green is Cloud Computing?

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Australian Open web traffic

This is a graph of traffic to the website of the Australian Open tennis championship. As you can see, the traffic spikes in January every year and then all but disappears for the other 11 months of the year. It is also important to note that the height of the traffic spike is increasing year on year.

If the owners of this site want to be able to serve all the traffic at the top peak of the peak, they can spend a fortune on servers capable of handling that level of traffic but these servers will be almost entirely idle for eleven months of the year. The alternative is that the owners put the site on a cloud platform and dial up the resources associated with it, as and when needed. This is obviously a vastly more efficient option for the site owners. However, that doesn’t mean that cloud computing itself is Green or efficient.

For cloud computing to be efficient, the individual servers need to be doing more work than they would be doing if not in a cloud infrastructure. The main cloud providers include Amazon, Google, IBM and more recently, Microsoft. As far as I know, none of these companies are providing utilisation data per unit, so it is not possible to know just how efficient cloud computing actually is.

There is another consideration. There are a number of start-ups who say that they couldn’t have built their infrastructure if it wasn’t for cloud i.e. theirs is additional consumption which wouldn’t haven’t existed without the cloud. Does this newly facilitated consumption mean that cloud computing is less Green?

And without usage data from the cloud providers will we ever truly know if cloud computing is Green?

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What if electricity were like the Internet?

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Power Lines
Photo Credit Bob Fornal

So, Nick Carr writes regularly about cloud computing and how the Internet is heading more and more towards the same model as the utilities. And he’s right. And this is a good thing.

Now let’s turn that on its head.

When will the utilities start to become more like the Internet? Specifically, when will disparate, disconnected electrical grids join up to give us one global electricity super-grid?

Can you imagine the resilience of a massively connected super-grid? One which can route around problems.

Then think about how much more stable the super-grid would be if the excess energy produced by, for instance, Scandanavian wind farms on windy nights could simply be sold to meet capacity shortages in the US as people arrive home from work, or in Japan as they start to wake up.

What if the grid were smart, publishing prices in real-time, based on supply and demand fluctuations?

And further, what if smart meters in homes and businesses could adjust appliances based on the real-time pricing (thermostats up/down, devices on/off, etc.)?

And what if, again like the Internet, the super-grid were read/write i.e. if you could be a producer as well as a consumer? Think plug-in hybrid vehicles, for example. In times of more abundant electrical supply when energy is cheap or negatively priced (sun shining on Spanish PhotoVoltaic arrays and/or wind blowing on Northern European wind farms), plug-in hybrids could suck in electricity and act as a distributed electrical storage mechanism. Several hours later, if the wind dies down, or the sun sets electricity prices jump and the smart meters realise it is now financially advantageous for plug-in hybrids to sell electricity back to the grid. So they do.

What if most of the technologies to make this happen already existed? How long will it be before the utilities embrace the Internet model in the same way the Internet is jumping on the utility model?

UPDATE: Simon Wardley writes that:

According to wikipedia, “the concept of an interconnected global grid linked to renewable resources was first suggested by Buckminster Fuller” in the 1970s.

There are even organisations such as the Global Energy Network Institute (GENI) who apparently have been working on the “viability of the interconnection of electric power networks between nations”.

This subject deserves a higher profile.

It seems I am in august company!