Obviously data centers shouldn't lie about the emissions, but it would be interesting to know how e.g. Amazon compares to the on-prem setup their offerings frequently replaces. Apple and Meta is a little different, in that none of their data center capacity directly replaces anything, it's all "extra".
Internally we had an interesting discussion, about travelling. Some one brought up that it might not look good that we fly to frequently, or at all. That's true, but it's also a very visible and easy to understand thing to focus on. One engineer does some quick napkin math and suggests that we optimize our code instead, as that would save more CO2 yearly, compared to us not flying. To me that's a really good indication of something that's wrong in the industry, we're not optimizing our code anymore, we're barely able to get rid of rarely used code and infrastructure, because keeping it running isn't really that expensive anymore.
Again, data centers shouldn't lie about emissions, but what difference would it make it they didn't? We're the ones buying the capacity, rather than moving to on-device computing, rather than an always running cloud. We spin up way more infrastructure than we should, because it's easy, and it doesn't cost that much.
I totally agree with you!
There are so many layers we could optimize, with various level of difficulty and return in term of cost and co2 reduction.
Legacy tech stack are especially wasteful: HW + OS + App running 24/7 regardless if it used or not.
My intuition is that AWS claims they can reduce CO2 emissions from your onprem stack by 80% because *IF* it was rewritten into a serverless app, it would consume energy only when it runs.
A friend of mine is heavily into AWS. Over the past two years he moved their entire organisation off of EC2 instances. They where apparently running EC2 for everything, and the reflect my experience as well. Organisations mostly see AWS as a hypervisor in the cloud.
We tried to move so many customers to some sort of container, auto-scaling EC2 (i.e. turning the instances off when not in use), Aurora, Lambda, you name it, anything that doesn't necessarily run 24/7. The customers don't like it. They don't feel safe, it's no familiar to them, they don't understand how they should manage it or make up reasons as to why they need to run MariaDB one EC2 or why EFS or S3 won't be able to replace their EC2 backed NFS share.
When it's done correctly, seeing an entire business running without a single VM or physical server is really a amazing thing to see.
Internally we had an interesting discussion, about travelling. Some one brought up that it might not look good that we fly to frequently, or at all. That's true, but it's also a very visible and easy to understand thing to focus on. One engineer does some quick napkin math and suggests that we optimize our code instead, as that would save more CO2 yearly, compared to us not flying. To me that's a really good indication of something that's wrong in the industry, we're not optimizing our code anymore, we're barely able to get rid of rarely used code and infrastructure, because keeping it running isn't really that expensive anymore.
Again, data centers shouldn't lie about emissions, but what difference would it make it they didn't? We're the ones buying the capacity, rather than moving to on-device computing, rather than an always running cloud. We spin up way more infrastructure than we should, because it's easy, and it doesn't cost that much.