Sharing responsibility for cloud sustainability

This is remit of the cloud provider/data center operator.

• Optimising cooling efficiency
• Reducing other impacts (water, waste, community)
• Using renewable energy
• Reducing embodied emissions of servers
• Ensuring energy efficient servers

This is the remit of the user provisioning services in the cloud.

• Green region selection
• Optimising utilisation and scaling of resources
• Rightsizing infrastructure
• Implementing efficient data and software design
• Fostering a culture of efficiency

I first came across this model in a presentation by Catherine Van Loo (Carnstone) at Green Tech Southwest in Decemeber, 2023. The above model for shared responsibility of cloud sustainability comes from ... Amazon Web Services. So yeah, they've got incentives to shift responsibility onto the user. It kinda has iky BP telling us to reduce our carbon footprint vibes.

Given the size of the major cloud providers, and the amount of cash they have available to throw at pretty much anything they want, I'd say the split of this shared responsibility should be biased towards them 70/30 at least.

That's not to say there's nothing users can do to make their cloud utilisation greener, just that the levers they have to pull have a smaller effect than those of the major cloud providers.