The public sector cannot underestimate the environmental impact of computing

With heatwaves blanketing three continents and global temperatures hitting record highs this summer, perhaps we need to pay more attention to ‘the cloud’ and the environmental impact of computing

The burning of fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and gas, is the biggest cause of climate change, but while that practice is often only associated with cars, air travel and factory emissions , did you know digital technology generates about 4% of global carbon emissions? Or that energy consumption is increasing by 9% every year?

It’s easy to visualize emissions from a factory or car but much less intuitive when it comes to someone developing software on their laptop. That could be a huge blind spot in cutting emissions, and the public sector needs to hold the tech industry more accountable for the emissions generated by the infrastructure used to deploy software. go out.

The environmental impact of computing on our planet

That developer’s laptop doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It and the thousands of servers in thousands of data centers that make up the cloud are also major sources of carbon emissions, surpassing the emissions of more than 22.2 million annual flights. Globally, the UK ranks third among countries for number of data centers, with 456 in 2022.

According to the Financial Times, while the UK is producing more electricity from renewable sources than ever before, at 40% renewables by 2022, the government has admitted that its “zero net strategy Their current net will not be able to cut greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently.” .

A net zero strategy will not cut greenhouse gas emissions enough

When these emissions are out of sight and unnoticed, it’s easy to ignore their impact. However, when we look at how energy is consumed in data centers, it becomes clear that the impact is significant.

Cloud carbon emissions are estimated to account for more than 2% of global electricity generation

According to Yale research in 2018, cloud carbon emissions were estimated to account for more than 2% of global electricity generation, with more recent data showing this figure is now 3%. To put it into perspective, a single data center consumes the electricity of 50,000 homes. When we multiply that by the 456 data centers in the UK and 8,000 globally, the impact becomes staggering.

The astonishing thing is that about 88% of that electricity is not even used for computing processes; it is used to ensure the cloud is always available 24/7 through cooling and maintaining redundant safety measures.

In short, ‘out of sight, out of mind’ is not a sound strategy for meeting the UK Government’s ambitious net zero targets. Under the Paris Climate Agreement, they have pledged to cut emissions by 68% by 2030, just seven years away. This target is intended to be the foundation towards achieving climate neutrality by 2050, i.e. a 100% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to 1990 levels, in parallel with the European Climate Law .

We need all tools we use to cut emissions, and when that happens, an unlikely candidate worth considering is cloud-native container orchestration technologies – specifically Kubernetes.

Cloud-native can reduce environmental impact

Kubernetes, whose name comes from the Greek word for ‘helmsman’ or ‘pilot’, is an open source container orchestration system. Like the captain of a ship, it is responsible for managing or orchestrating containerized cloud applications, always ensuring proper compute, networking, storage, and configuration.

It enables organizations to develop, terminate, update, and scale applications with better resiliency, governance, security, visibility, and lower operating costs.

However, when viewed from an environmental perspective, Kubernetes boasts less obvious advantages. It increases or decreases computer power automatically and intelligently based on what is needed, preventing wastage of resources. This way you will never leave a resource idle or overused.

AI and ML: Future technologies and our changing environment

With the AI ​​fever we are experiencing, this will be important as AI/ML workloads are weighing heavily on hardware. And as mentioned earlier, the majority of power consumed in a data center is used to cool that hardware, of which up to 40% is cooling alone. With the growing popularity of AI, that number is only going to get worse.

Kubernetes can play an important role in alleviating this because although it is not specifically designed to be a “persistent engine,” it To be designed to manage and avoid hardware redundancy. It can optimize and streamline those AI workloads (or any workload) at scale.

Even something as basic as a software testing environment can see a lower footprint using Kubernetes. The old model of ‘containerless’ virtual machines will force companies to keep test environments running – even when they’re not testing. In contrast, Kubernetes allows you to scale your test environment up and down as needed. This is important because the more time spent developing or testing, the greater the carbon footprint.

What matters is ‘when’ you adopt cloud-based technology

Unsurprisingly, one of the reasons why the UK public sector struggles with digital transformation is the slow pace of adoption of new technology.

This is not just a matter of efficiency and innovation. Your environmental impact is affected by When you adopt Kubernetes. At my recent Kubecon presentation, Scale down your environmental impactMy colleague Zinnia Gibson and I demonstrated this by asking audiences to participate in a thought experiment:

Imagine two large companies in game development with the same product. Company A uses Kubernetes, but Company B that intends to use it in the future still uses virtual machines.

Companies using Kubernetes, thanks to its ‘auto-scaling’ capabilities, automatically use fewer resources from the data center due to the nature of the infrastructure design, while the alternative to leaves too much room for resources to be mismanaged at scale.

It’s also important to note that any public sector organization that releases an app that sees a significant increase in user numbers will inevitably need to scale that app. If they haven’t integrated Kubernetes into their workloads, they now need to worry about training and infrastructure. Spending more time and energy on computation means more emissions.

The battle for sustainability will not be resolved with a single solution

Of course, let’s be clear: Not available this means that Kubernetes is ‘the only thing’ that will defeat climate change. As one of my favorite voices in the field of sustainable development, Shelbi Orme says: “You cannot do all the good the world needs, but the world needs all the good you can do”.

The fight for sustainability will not be solved by a single solution, person or industry; We all have a role to play. The tech industry’s potential to make a major impact cannot be ignored, and the public sector needs to think about computing in the same way. Kubernetes is just one arguably effective way to start curbing unnecessary computing inefficiencies, thereby helping to reduce the environmental impact and carbon footprint of computing.

The best part is that public sector IT teams can access upstream projects for free to reduce development time, reduce costs and reduce environmental impact. There are many alternatives, but here are some favorites:

• GreenFrame: an open source tool that measures and reduces CO2 emissions on your website by detecting carbon leaks.
• Prometheus: not explicitly designed to track emissions but can help get metrics so you know when resource loss is occurring.
• Microsoft Emissions Impact Dashboard: a tool explicitly focused on displaying carbon emissions when using the Azure cloud.

Any responsible organization will look to improve the efficiency of their use of renewable energy to reduce their carbon footprint (such as making their offices more environmentally friendly, sequestering carbon , etc). But with the climate getting worse like this, we have an obligation to use as many tools as possible. Kubernetes should be part of that mix.

This piece was written and provided by Mary Karroqe, Software Engineer at D2iQ