Clouds Are Not Always Bad

Big data centres are responsible for increasing amounts of emissions, but lets not overreact

In the media today it is impossible to get away from climate change. I’m not going to get into the argument of whether it is real and if it is caused by humans. That is a subject for another post. Anyway we are constantly hearing about initiatives to become greener in various aspects of our lives. Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a good thing, but these often irritate me as I don’t think they take into account the big picture. Or they are too simplistic and have no nuance.

Something which I have noticed gaining more and more prominence in recent years is reports of the proliferation of data centres and their contribution to climate change. I won’t go into the various statistics which are quoted because they can vary wildly, depending on what article you look at. Undoubtedly though, yes it requires energy to construct data centres and when they are up and running they use huge amounts of electricity, not only to run the servers but also for cooling (up to forty per cent in round numbers). Is this a problem though? Or is this actually the best way of doing things? I’ll be totally honest I don’t know the answer but I definitely think it is worth thinking about, rather than blindly demonising the cloud which we all now so heavily depend on in the developed world. So let’s actually have a look at what we use it for in our day-to-day lives. I think we’ll find whether the cloud - and the big data centres which drive it - is good or bad can be slightly more nuanced.

You wake up in the morning, and if you are like me one of the first things you do is check the news. You probably do this on your phone or tablet with your morning coffee. The news sites you visit are all hosted in data centres. Before we were checking the news on our devices chances are you had a newspaper delivered. Think about the energy which would have gone into producing that. From cutting down the tree to make the paper, to running the printing press, to the distribution of the paper to the local paper shop. Finally down to the school kid who delivered it to your door - hopefully they walked or rode their bike.

Then you check your calendar on your phone to see what meetings you have scheduled at work. You are probably using an app such as Google Calendar or Calendar on your iPhone. Otherwise it would be a paper diary, again how much energy went into producing this. How many times have you left it at the office when going to an important meeting then had to go back and get it? If it’s in the cloud, it doesn’t matter, you just pull it up on another device.

Your day starts by meeting a client across the city at an unfamiliar office. How do you find your way there? You pull out your phone and put the address into your navigation app of choice. This looks up the address and gets the navigation information from a data centre. By the way, it’s not from the GPS, all that does is tell your phone exactly where it is - let’s not get started on that one. What’s the alternative? You would have had a paper spiral bound map in your car. More paper, but also undoubtedly you would have made a few wrong turns as you navigate rush hour traffic glancing down at your map. As if driving and talking on your cellphone wasn’t bad enough. Anyway, more fuel burn and emissions from your vehicle.

Back at the office you open up your email. Chances are this is web-based, but if not and you are still using the abomination which is Outlook, your company probably does not have a physical email server, this is likely hosted off site in a data centre. Now it’s not always going to be the case, but chances are your company does not maintain its own servers these days. You are probably using mainly cloud based applications like Google Docs or Xero. These are all running in data centres, but by centralising all of this computing it can be done a lot more efficiently. Powerful servers can run many virtual machines with containerised applications. It’s more efficient, in the same way as putting thirty people on a bus is more efficient than them each driving their car. There are still some emissions but per head it is much less. It also means your company does not need to own all of that infrastructure.

At lunchtime you meet an old friend who you haven’t seen for a long time, so you take a couple of selfies while you enjoy your walk through the park. These photos are uploaded to your cloud storage provider of choice and you share them with your friend. Chances are, neither of you will ever print these photos. If you had wanted to share them before that is what you would have had to do. And with film, think of all those nasty chemicals. You will most definitely want to keep your photo’s safe. If your house burns down now, your photos are all safely stored in the cloud. Previously, if you had wanted to get serious about this, you would have needed to buy a fireproof safe. I don’t know what the carbon footprint of producing one of those is, but it’s got to be relatively significant. Just think about the steel which need to be refined for starters.

You get home, and to relax you decide to watch a movie, because let’s face it you don’t want to watch the rubbish on TV. So you open your favourite video streaming app, cast it to your TV and put your feet up. Where is this movie stored? In a data centre somewhere of course. But what is the alternative? Get in your car and drive to the local Blockbuster (does that still exist?). Driving causes enough emissions sure but think of all the raw materials required to make, store, and distribute all of those DVDs. Or VHS cassettes if you’re old enough?

Ok, so some of my examples are possibly stretching it a little and in some cases I might be wrong, but hopefully you get the point I’m making. It’s too simplistic just to demonise our dependance on big data centres and the cloud.

There are certainly some things we can do to improve things. When you take a picture how often do you get it right the first time? Probably you have three or four versions of the same picture and only one you are happy with. Do you go back and delete the others? If not, chances are they are backed up to the cloud and will sit there taking up space in a data centre. If you multiply this by all the pictures you take and then by billions of people, it starts to add up.

Like all things there are good and bad ways of doing it. If you build a data centre in the middle of a desert and hook it up to a coal fired power, station that’s not exactly the most sustainable way of doing things. But if it is put in a more suitable location, such as one with a cooler climate and good access to renewable sources of electricity, this minimises the impact. Obviously this is not always possible, those locations also have to have excellent connectivity. There are also data sovereignty issues, where data is required to reside in a particular jurisdiction. We just have to remember to look at the big picture and do the thing which is best overall.

There are other downsides to doing away with your own infrastructure and outsourcing this to a cloud provider. You lose control, often these providers make it very easy to onboard at a reasonable price. When the executives see the large capital costs to replace some aging infrastructure and compare this to the significantly smaller operational expenditure of paying a cloud service provider, it looks very attractive. However, once you are in, you are in. It can be very difficult to extract your data and move back to your own infrastructure.

I’ll leave you with a few thoughts. How often have you bought something online where you would otherwise have had to make a special trip to the physical retailer to pick it up? It came via the courier, yes the courier is driving a diesel van but they are also dropping off hundreds of packages in your neighbourhood. A more efficient use of resources. How often have you watched a YouTube video and fixed something you would otherwise have discarded and bought a replacement? How many people have started new careers where they now work from home and don’t need to commute?

There are hundreds of other examples and counterexamples, but look at the big picture. Every cloud has a silver lining.