Cloud CO2 Footprint Calculators — Part 1: the GCP Carbon Footprint

Considering the impact of any personal and professional activities on climate change is becoming more and more important. IT projects also start to consider this aspect during the design phase: digital has already an important weight on the global CO2 emissions and this will quickly grow in the next years.

The digital technologies emit now 4% of greenhouse gas emissions (see https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/unsustainable-use-online-video/) where:

• the use of digital technology accounts for 55%
• the production of equipment accounts for 45%

The usage of digital technology needs electricity and this produce emissions. A big part of this activity is done on the cloud.

The major cloud providers are doing actions to reduce the carbon footprint of their services and to help their clients to understand and optimize this metric for the resources they use in their projects.

Google, Microsoft and Amazon has recently released some tools to measure and help to understand how to reduce the impact of the deployed projects:

• Google Cloud Carbon Footprint
• Azure Emissions Impact Dashboard
• AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool

Google Cloud Carbon Footprint

The GCP Carbon Footprint is integrated in the console (for free). As stated in their website, “Google looks at the gross carbon emissions produced by the computing infrastructure supporting its internal services. Google apportions those gross emissions to each Google Cloud product, and allocates the emissions to a customer based on the customer’s usage of those Google Cloud products.”

Some information about the used methodology:

• Google takes the emissions coming from all electricity sources in a specific location
• They consider hourly emissions because the source plants providing electricity changes constantly
• They use data for power and activity at machine level provided by monitoring inside data center

Google can link the machine emissions to the services used by the customers and give an estimation of the user’s footprint thanks to the resources usage.

A complete overview of the used methodology can be found at https://cloud.google.com/carbon-footprint/docs/methodology?_ga=2.266770830.-109207675.1645272138

GCP Carbon Footprint Dashboard

From the dashboard you can have an overview of the emissions linked to the services you are using in your account.

Some of its features:

Segmentation

It’s possible to segment the total amounts by:

• project
• service
• region
• month

BigQuery export

The export to BigQuery allows analysis and the creation of custom dashoboards.

Reduction recommendations

Another information that is available is the emissions reduction achievable removing idle projects

Conclusion

The Carbon Footprinter is a first valid tool to measure the emissions’ impact of projects running on Google Cloud. It can be used to measure and to optimize the usage of the services and it’s one of the solutions proposed by GCP to reduce the emissions. We’ll discover other possibilities provided by the Mountain View’s firm in a coming article.