Experts at Turn it Off, an intelligent SaaS platform enabling businesses to be more sustainable in their use of cloud, explain the environmental and cost-related challenges faced by the cloud industry today.
The situation in public cloud: out-of-control costs and out-of-control carbon
The cloud industry, and businesses that have adopted the cloud, are facing two harsh realities in 2024.
The first is that the savings and efficiencies promised have yet to materialise for many at the medium-to-large enterprise level.
The second is that cloud computing – as currently implemented – is not the sustainable technology it once seemed.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, the cloud promised greener, more energy-efficient computing with a broad scope for evolution.
In some ways, that promise has held. However, the last decade’s rapid adoption has brought limitations to the surface.
How the cloud boom went dirty: inefficiencies and high-carbon emission data centres
At the heart of this story is people.
Cloud has a great affinity for low-cost ephemeral solutions. And through cloud-native practices like serverless computing, containerisation, and microservices, it’s possible to engineer dramatically more optimised, greener technology.
So, what went wrong?
Rapid adoption
With the total size of the US cloud market alone rising by over 1000% between 2008 and 2014, the cloud boom was a fundamental shift on the scale of smartphones, social media or IoT.
And while rapid adoption isn’t a detriment in and of itself, the speed with which cloud technologies swept the market helped drive the real causes of the cost and carbon issues we see today.
Skeuomorphic, IT-oriented design
Definitions first. Skeuomorphic design describes a digital UI or appearance that mimics an analogue predecessor. E-readers with turnable pages; a phone’s ticking hour and minute hands; the trash icon on a desktop computer.
In cloud, skeuomorphism has meant that many IT departments (and some managed cloud providers), eager to adopt cloud computing, simply replicated the functionality of existing data centres.
These new environments failed to take advantage of the scalability and ephemerality on offer. Instead, in a rush to embrace new technology, many simply transferred the logic of their existing environment to the cloud.
A non-adaptive business model
This point builds on the second, because it wasn’t only the IT teams who built to a skeuomorphic vision of cloud.
Much of the initial cloud boom was capitalised on by the hardware companies that had monopolised the bare metal server market for decades.
And they sold cloud in much the same way they had sold physical servers: at a low profit margin, on a very high number of fungible units. This meant they could use their capital and existing market share to dominate the cloud boom without updating their model.
The result, again, was a proliferation of a skeuomorphic, inefficient version of the cloud.
Later, MSPs engineering optimised, scalable solutions became a powerful market force. But by this time, many had already bought into the legacy cloud model proliferated by these repositioned hardware companies.
Data, data everywhere nor any drop to drink
In response to a rapidly growing demand, public cloud providers set to building data centres across the world.
In 2020, the number of hyperscale data centres in the public cloud space doubled from where it had stood just 5 years before, in 2015.
That same year, Facebook announced its own data centres had consumed 6.966 million megawatt-hours. This is roughly equivalent to the annual consumption of a small city.
Then, there is the issue of water usage. To cool, the overheating machinery of a large data centre requires approximately 360,000 gallons daily.
This has a large impact on local water supply, agriculture, and ecosystems.
Presently, many public cloud providers focus on renewable energy sources and building for greener outcomes. But in that first crucial decade, sustainability was out of the conversation.
Why cloud is inefficient and unsustainable
It isn’t.
As we can see, the driver of these inefficiencies is a collective failure to build sustainability and efficiency into our adoption of the cloud.
In one sense, the cloud changed computing too quickly; in another, it didn’t change it enough.
So, how can cloud pivot to sustainability and efficiency in 2024?
These three action points extend to public MSPs and cloud users alike.
There is already a shift toward efficiency and sustainability in the industry, and those at the forefront stand the most to gain.
Embrace FinOps and GreenOps
Both end clients and MSPs should embrace FinOps and GreenOps. If FinOps is the connection of IT, finance and development for intelligent resource management, GreenOps is the addition of sustainability.
Many tools and solutions exist in this space, and businesses concerned with sustainability and resource efficiency could do well to explore the market.
While some tools are focused solely on cost optimisation, many more delve into holistic solutions, connecting sustainability to cloud and financial management.
Embrace cloud-native architecture and refactoring
As we’ve seen, many of the inefficiencies of cloud come down to a failure to embrace the full potential of this technology.
To drive innovation, end users should look to refactor their solutions away from the skeuomorphic designs resembling traditional hardware.
Instead, brands should look for partnerships with cloud-native MSPs who specialise in building the scalability, ephemerality, and cost efficiency made possible by cloud-native architecture.
Practices like auto-scaling, rightsizing and good governance can prevent overprovisioning and vastly reduce cloud waste.
Make sustainability a key target to drive innovation in the public cloud market
Collectively, we need to demand sustainability.
Major public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform have already made some improvements: increasingly powering data centres with renewables like wind and solar, improving cooling technologies, and committing to carbon offsets elsewhere.
However, we shouldn’t take these gestures at face value. Like many corporations, cloud providers will highlight nominal improvements in an effort to greenwash their offerings.
A sceptical attitude must be part of the drive to make sustainability a key tenet of ESG and CSR.
Keeping the promise
The vision of a more efficient, greener computing is well within reach. As advances in renewables, AI, and server virtualisation proliferate, there’s never been greater potential for a sustainable cloud.
By embracing technological change and environmental accountability we can make good on the promise of cloud computing.
