Green Computing Initiatives in Cloud Data Centers

Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry were 36.8 gigatons (Gt) in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). This is an increase of 0.9% in energy production from 2021, and the highest level of emissions ever recorded. The IEA projects that global CO2 emissions will continue to rise in the coming years, reaching 42 Gt by 2030 if no additional action is taken to reduce emissions. This would put the world on track for a temperature rise of 2.7 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, which would have devastating consequences for the planet.

Green Cloud Computing is a revolutionary practice that aims to minimize the carbon footprint and energy consumption associated with cloud infrastructure and operations. It’s all about implementing sustainable strategies, optimizing resource allocation, and promoting eco-friendly practices in enterprise data centers.

Green cloud refers to the potential environmental benefits that green IT services delivered over the internet can offer to individual companies and society as a whole. The term combines the words green meaning environmentally friendly and cloud, the traditional symbol for the internet and the shortene name for cloud computing.

Data centers are consuming a significant amount of energy overall, and this usage will only accelerate as digital transformation initiatives in companies further expand and data center growth continues. In particular, cloud data centers often are behemoth facilities, housing thousands of servers, numerous racks of storage devices, miles of networks and the peripheral infrastructure necessary to keep everything running. To address the environmental challenges associated with these facilities, cloud service providers have been adopting green cloud practices to varying degrees, more so in areas under public scrutiny.

In this sense, green cloud computing refers to the steps that service providers are taking to improve the environmental profiles of their data centers by implementing green computing approaches. The resulting green clouds can also contribute to broader environmental, social and governance (ESG) programs at the cloud vendors themselves and companies that use their services. Greener IT is a common component of corporate ESG initiatives, which aim to improve the environmental and social impact of organizations and ensure that their business practices are ethical and fair.

How does green cloud computing work?

Cloud service providers typically employ multiple strategies to attain greener data centers. These efforts target efficiency improvements in one or more of the following areas:

•Energy sources. The provider uses renewable energy as much as possible to power its data centers. This often includes wind or solar energy, along with large battery banks for storing the collected energy. Some providers use renewable energy credits (RECs) to offset their carbon footprint, giving them license to claim that their data centers use 100% renewable energy. However, RECs are not the same as eliminating the use of fossil fuels.

•Facility. The provider takes measures to use energy more efficiently in its data centers. For example, a provider might locate a data center in a cold climate, underground or even on the ocean floor. The provider might also find ways to apply the excess heat generated in the data centers, such as using it to warm nearby buildings. Additionally, providers might rely on machine learning or artificial intelligence technologies to monitor and optimize energy usage. Modifying the data center floor layout to improve air circulation through the use of hot and cold aisles or implementing water cooling systems to handle equipment-generated heat are other strategies.

•Infrastructure. The provider optimizes the hardware and software infrastructure. For instance, a provider might deploy hardware that consumes less energy or use strategies such as dynamic voltage and frequency scaling to reduce power consumption. The provider might also maximize resource utilization to reduce the number of servers and storage devices -- for example, by implementing virtualization technology or software-defined infrastructure.

•Workflow. The provider uses multiple strategies to optimize IT workflows at every level. This might include shifting workloads to different times, modifying applications to reduce network traffic, optimizing storage and server caches, automating routine tasks or taking any number of other steps to reduce energy usage.

As examples of green cloud practices by top cloud platform vendors, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft have both said they plan to use 100% renewable energy in their data centers by 2025. Google has said it achieved that in its Google Cloud facilities in 2017 and is aiming to run them all on carbon-free energy sources by 2030. Microsoft is working to be carbon-negative by that year, while AWS is looking to reach net-zero carbon usage by 2040.