Cloud CO2 Footprint Calculators — Part 2: Azure Emissions Impact Dashboard
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
Azure Emissions Impact Dashboard
The tool proposed by Azure to track emissions and get suggestions to optimize the carbon footprint of their cloud services is based on Power BI template applications and an accounting method validated by third parties. At this date (16/4/2022), the tool is in preview.
It allows to calculate the carbon emissions for Cloud usage for your enterprise and easily share them with stakeholders.
Users with billing admin permissions can access the dashboard. This is required since the informations are strictly related with the expenses. The dashboard requires also a Power BI Pro License.
Installation
The tool can be installed going to App Source and searching for Emissions Impact Dashboard.
Once installed the tool, you need to connect it with the billing data through an OAuth security step:
It can take up to 24 hours to see the data related to the emissions in your dashboard.
Dashboard data
Once the data loaded some graphs will show up:
The emissions take into account everything that is used by Azure to run the services in your behalf like, for example, electricity and the entire value chain needed to manufacturing servers and datacenter.
The charts shows also:
- the yearly global cloud usage
- the company carbon intensity (carbon emissions related to cloud usage)
To discover more about emissions metrics you can go to the detail page where you will find:
- breakdown by geographies
- emissions by scope (1, 2 and 3)
- breakdown by services
Then, you can move to the Emissions saving page where you will see how much carbon footprint your company is saving comparing with a typical on premises solution (you can see in the page the estimated emissions for the on premises approach for a similar computing level)
You can also see the savings coming from efficiency of Azure Cloud and those coming from renouvelable energy.
Conclusion
The Azure Emissions Dashboard is a simple and easy to use tool to measure the emissions of your workloads on Azure cloud. The pain point is that the tool requires a Pro License for Power BI so it can not be used of any kind of account.
