How Green is the Cloud, Anyway?
One of the ‘hype’ messages about the Cloud is that it is green – meaning environmentally friendlier than companies running vast resource-wasting machines that need constant energy for maintenance. Well, is this merely hype, or is there any truth to the claim.
Cnet news raises the question, too, and quotes a great blog post on the subject that brings up some realistic points about the Cloud’s level of greenness. First, the problem is that is difficult to measure cloud greenness with the information that’s out there because none of the major cloud companies are providing utilization data.
I especially like this quote: “We now have the ability to run our applications on thousands of servers, but previously this wasn’t even possible. To say it another way, we can potentially use several years worth of energy in literary a few hours, where previously this wasn’t even an option.”
So, wait. Doesn’t that make Cloud computing more of an energy gobbler than companies’ current IT methods? The author says: “…hypothetically we’re using more resources, not less.”
But conversely, if companies possessed those thousand servers and ran them (underutilized), the power usage per utilized server would be significantly higher. The author adds: “But then again, buying those servers would have been out reach for most, so it’s not a fair comparison. There we are–back, at where we started. You may use 80 percent less energy per unit, but have 1,000 percent more capacity, which at the end of the day means you’re using more, not less energy.”
You might look at this issue with the U.S. Interstate Highway system in mind. Eisenhower kicked off the project in the 50s, and the development of super-highways cutting across underdeveloped lands opened those places to development – and more consumption of resources.
Another cloud blogger quoted in the cnet piece added: “…Cloud computing is all about providing standard components as services (it’s pure volume operations). The problem of course is that we will end up consuming more of these standard components because it’s so easy to do so (i.e. in old speak, there is less yak shaving) and it becomes easier to build new and more exciting services on these (standing on the shoulders of giants). ”
Certainly, there are plenty of stories out there about how governments and companies are saving and being more efficient by running apps and data centers on the cloud. But that’s not the same as green computing, is it?
But I hold out my judgment on the greenness of cloud computing until we as an industry come up with an efficient, standardized way of measuring it.