The advantages of using the cloud have become clear and indisputable in the past couple of years. These benefits have largely driven the adoption of cloud computing all across the world, leading to the construction and maintenance of thousands of data centers globally.
As versatile as the cloud is turning out to be, many organizations still have questions regarding how it works. Or to be more specific, companies are searching for more clarity concerning how much energy the cloud actually consumes. Its a question thats not necessarily easy to answer since cloud providers can vary greatly depending on their size, the number of customers they have, and what features they offer.
Finding out the correct information, however, is the goal of many organizations and could help quantify the tradeoffs businesses make when moving their operations to the cloud.
Reasons for Understanding Energy Consumption
There are, of course, many reasons a business may wish to know how much power is needed to use cloud computing. One of the major ones involves environmental concerns. Thats why 19 customers of Amazon Web Services (AWS) have signed a letter urging Amazon to release information regarding the companys energy consumption and carbon footprint.
Some of those customers, like Hootsuite, are benefit corporations, which are chartered to meet specific standards related to the environment. Tumblr and Upworthy are other customers demanding more transparency, citing other cloud providers like Google and Microsoft which are more forthcoming with their energy consumption statistics. As the largest public cloud provider in the world, AWS will likely continue facing mounting pressure to reveal the energy needed to run their cloud services.
It’s More Than Just Environmental Concerns
But its not just environmental concerns that are driving the search for more information. Some companies simply want to know about the electricity required to run the cloud out of concerns over cost. One of the major benefits of what is cloud computing is the amount of money it can save the organization that adopts it. Part of those savings come from lower energy consumption.
Without a cloud provider, businesses would have to set up their own data center, which in turn requires electricity to run and cool. If a company is able to pass those costs onto a cloud provider that is already attending to other customers, the overall cost comes down. Companies can get the same amount of work done for only a fraction of the price.
Even with environmental and cost concerns in mind, its still difficult to accurately measure the amount of power needed to run the cloud. Numerous factors have to be taken into account, such as the electricity consumed by computers, switches, and hard disks, how that electricity was produced in the first place (coal, hydro, wind, etc.), and how much carbon is released into the environment as a result.
Another factor that cant be ignored is the overall impact of small, individual data centers compared to larger infrastructure data centers. This is largely Amazons point, that even if they dont release energy information, their work still takes less power than if each customer had to set up a cloud on their own.
Energy Consumption in Numbers
So are there numbers regarding global energy consumption as a result of the cloud? Right now, there are only estimations, but they do indicate some incredible amounts. A report from ABB shows that every data center in the world consumes about one-and-a-half times as much energy in a year as New York City.
Roughly speaking, one data center uses up as much electricity as 25,000 average homes in the U.S. The report goes on to show that at the rate the cloud is growing, by 2020, data centers could produce almost half as much CO2 as U.S. cars produce in a year. If there are savings to be had, it would be in making servers more efficient, ensuring theyre working at maximum capacity. That may require using larger data centers, like those employed by cloud providers like AWS.
Though the numbers arent exact, its clear that the cloud uses a lot of electricity to keep it running. As more and more companies make a transition to the cloud, the amount of energy needed will only increase. Whether out of concern for the environment or the bottom line, this will remain a topic of interest for many organizations as the push to make the cloud more efficient will continue to grow.
