Cloudy forecast

[transam]

In the battle of climate change and the UKs drive to be carbon neutral

One little mentioned threat to the planet Comes from cloud the online storage network that's stores the world's data much of it from social platforms

This collection of data centres distributed in massive server farms world wide are consuming leccy like there us no tomorrow

Current estimates put the impact of cloud on carbon emissions at around 4% but is predicted to rise to 14% by 2040

keep post g them selfies

 

[motorbiking]

people mining cryptos, spending more on Power and cooling than they earn from the bitcoin are contributing a fair bit. Particularly since GPUs tend to consume more power.

 

[EddieM]

In the battle of climate change and the UKs drive to be carbon neutral

One little mentioned threat to the planet Comes from cloud the online storage network that's stores the world's data much of it from social platforms

This collection of data centres distributed in massive server farms world wide are consuming leccy like there us no tomorrow

Current estimates put the impact of cloud on carbon emissions at around 4% but is predicted to rise to 14% by 2040

keep post g them selfies

Hmmm, it's more complicated than that I'm afraid, cloud computing uses about 10% of the power of traditional on prem server farms, based on equivalent processing power. Add into the mix that cloud facilities are housed in cool locations and many are or are committed to using energy from renewable sources then the argument becomes, ahem, clouded.

You can read a bit more about it here but bear in mind it's an Amazon article, so take it with a large pitch of salt.

 

[motorbiking]

In the rush for dominance there are a lot of half empty cloud DCs running away without any tenants. But the argument that a shared resource (i.e. a cloud) is more efficient than an on Prem resource is sound. When you buy a physical machine, you tend to be driven by availability and performance rather than size. An average in-house database server will run at 20% utilisation only peaking occasionally for say a month end billing or payroll run.

 

[bernardgreen]

Bitcoin is a big consumer of power

Quoting from THIS

It [ University of Cambridge ] found that Bitcoin uses an estimated 61.76 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity per year - more than many countries and approximately 0.28% of total global electricity consumption.