How Sustainable is your Cloud Infrastructure
Most of the organisations now have their footprint in the cloud to deploy their applications and leverage the benefits of the Cloud ecosystem like scalability, pay as you go, reduced infra procurement & management overhead.
But whether these infrastructure components and services are efficiently used? The answer is NO, I have seen many services are underutilised and teams pay the cost for it. It’s not just the cost that we pay for inefficiency but also the environmental sustainability.
Carbon Cloud Footprint is an open-source tool that provides data about your cloud Infra CO2 emissions and appropriate recommendations. I just tried for one of the cloud apps and is impressive, to begin with. I am not a profound reviewer of tools and this is my personal view on this tool.
Carbon Cloud Footprint app can run as containers or standalone app, I did set this up in my local machine. It requires node version > 14.0.0, use the below command to create the app which prompts for the name of the app.
npx @cloud-carbon-footprint/create-app
It can connect to Azure, AWS and GCP for now and various ways to collect and use the data. However, you need to configure the app with either Azure App credentials or GCP service accounts to access the subscription details for analysis as here. I configured a GCP project with a service key to access bigquery. Once done you can start the app.
yarn start
Open your chrome tab to http://localhost:3000 and you see Carbon Cloud Foot Print Dashboard as below.
This tool also provides recommendations on opportunities to reduce CO2 emissions as well as to reduce costs, including unused components.
When organisations and enterprises are focusing more and more towards sustainability, these kinds of tools would support understanding and provide a report on their Cloud CO2 emissions which will aid their sustainability targets on Cloud infra as well.
Two Cents
I always emphasise development teams to do due diligence before choosing a cloud service or components, and consultation with respective technical stakeholders, rather choose based on the fanciness (e.g SQL vs NoSQL, VMs vs K8s, etc) without knowing what is what.
Most of the apps will be running in multiple environments like dev, QA, stage and prod, and even prod apps may not be required to be live 24x7. It is wise to suspend the unused resources when it is needed, which will save cost and reduce CO2 emissions to our environment.
