Is Cloud Computing Bad For The Environment? The Internet's Carbon Footprint
Is cloud computing bad for the environment? What is the carbon footprint of the internet?
In this video I discuss the environmental impact of cloud computing in an effort to answer the above questions.
I also describe some ways in which we, as individuals, can lessen our impact on the environment through the demands we place on energy supplies by our online activities.
What is Cloud Computing or The Cloud?
Scroll back a few decades and most applications were installed in computers of various sizes, from the early and expensive personal computers to large mainframes run by private companies and government departments.
As the technology evolved the hardware became smaller, the processing power increased dramatically, and by linking computers into networks, the internet and the world wide web grew to what we have available to us today.
The rapid growth included the storage capacity of each computer, and as the web grew, storage servers and applications on the internet were made available for use by individuals and businesses.
The Cloud then is just a network of computers on the internet.
The benefits of cloud computing include extra capacity, resilience, and more efficient use of storage, and processing power by networking together various physical and virtual components.
So, by switching to cloud computing we’re making more efficient use of the resources available to us.
The problem with this method is that it makes us lazy, as we shall see.
Any computer of any size, whether it’s your laptop, PC, or something larger in the basement of an office block, generates heat.
Therefore, most computers need a fan inside them to keep the temperature under control.
So as well as the power needed for the motherboard and all peripherals, the computer needs constant cooling.
The bigger and busier the computer, the bigger the fan and therefore the more power it needs.
If you have a room full of these computers then you may need not only a fan in each but air conditioning for the entire room, operating 24 hours a day, with a backup power supply in case the mains supply fails (often referred to as UPS, uninterrupted power supply).
Twenty-five years ago, when I first started in data communications, the IBM data centres I worked in had rooms the size of tennis courts packed with row after row of cabinets containing routers, switches, firewalls, and storage servers.
They were all kept at optimum temperature, 24 hours per day, and that model hasn’t changed.
The difference is that now every aspect of each data centre has increased dramatically; size, power, capacity, and the amount of energy they consume.
With the Web and the Cloud growing every day the demands placed upon it mean it’s a gigantic consumer of electricity.
In 2019, according to KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, the internet was consuming 10% of the world’s electricity, an increase of 4% on 2016, reflecting the rapid growth of the network and the demands placed upon it.
Continued in the video...
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