Cloud Carbon Benchmarking

When we look at cloud GreenOps, we're specifically looking at how different teams are impacting our carbon footprint. So when people use cloud, they are using storage and compute, which takes up server capacity and requires cooling, all of which uses electricity, which creates greenhouse gases. Also, generally, you can consider the creation of the kit as well.  Sometimes that's harder to work out. So when we talk about benchmarking this, we're talking about giving people an understanding of where they are and the missions they're creating and how they can improve that against themselves or against other teams.

Why does this help?

It helps in two regards. Firstly, usage optimization, which reduces the carbon footprint for cloud also, reduces costs. So we can generally say that your cloud cost position will be improved by certain activities that people acting upon their carbon benchmarking might take part in.

The second piece is more obviously it will actually reduce your carbon emissions, which is better for the planet. And beyond that is going to help you with your long -term ability to position and report on your cloud carbon footprint. This will come into effect in the next few years, depending on whether it gets pushed back again. So having this visibility, in FinOps we call it the Prius effect, basically visibility helps drive people to action.  So if people understand that what they've done has increased emissions, or maybe just what they've done in general has quite a high carbon footprint, then we can help them reduce that by showing them where they are and how activities change that position over time.

Where can it be used?

I generally say it should be used at a product or team level within your engineering teams. So you can show where these teams are and how the activities they do over time improve or worsen their carbon position. And that way it can become a non -functional requirement, a bit like cost and cost conscious architecture, but we can consider this carbon conscious architecture.

So how do you make sure that you're being as carbon efficient as possible when you are delivering your workloads? Could it be in a greener location? Can you use greener technologies? Can you be more efficient with right sizing, leave less headroom, this kind of thing. And when people start seeing the impacts of their actions, we hope that it will drive better reaction and therefore reduce your carbon footprint as an organisation and from those particular products.

So who should drive it?

I think generally this should come from leadership, whether that's engineering leadership, whether it's your sustainability officer. But as an organisation, you need to be seen as someone who takes this seriously for it to have a big impact. One of the benefits versus cost optimization is that more employees often care about the carbon implications.  This is because often when they're spending company money, they don't see it as real money or their own money, but it's not company carbon. It's everyone's carbon footprint. And therefore it has a direct impact on their lives. So it can actually drive great action.

How do you get started?

So that's a great question. Well, the first point is creating some level of visibility and to do that, you have to get some data. It can be very difficult to compare apples to apples with data, especially the stuff coming out of the cloud vendors when we talk about cloud carbon footprint and cloud green ops. They calculate things differently. They display the data differently. Beyond that, they include different things. So for instance, they may not include scope 3. They may say scope two doesn't count because they buy renewable electricity, but unfortunately that's not how the grid works. As such, we need to have something that is defensible, believable, and gives us a benchmark across the organisation.

For this, you could go out there and buy a tool like GreenPixie who are leaders in the market. They give you the ability to have enriched near real time data and dashboards around your cloud carbon usage across multiple clouds. They enrich things like the cost and usage report from AWS.

The alternative is to use an open source tool such as cloudcarbonfootprint .org. And from this, you can use the cost and usage report, the Azure consumption APIs and the Google billing export.

You can put this data into the tool and then you can either use the GUI or APIs to create your own visualisations to start benchmarking for the team using the kind of separation you already have. So if you're using account based separation for different teams, you can use their accounts, look at the accounts compared to each other and how they go over time. This uses the Etsy Cloud Jewels model and it has some simplicity that is needed to make it all of this sort work, especially for an open source project. But it's a great starting point, which you can do for relatively little cost apart from the time of setting up. And then you can start having different teams be able to compare on the same scale and they can compare themselves versus time gone as well.

So in conclusion, this doesn't have to be costly to get started. You need to create visibility so people can understand the impact of their actions. And this should drive better outcomes for both your carbon footprint and hopefully your cloud cost as well.

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