Who can hear me? If you can hear me at the back froming through the sound, can you, okay,
it's, I think, it sounds like you can hear me at the back. Excellent, all right. Okay,
well, it turns out I'm a little bit early, but I'm going to use those two minutes for
questions at the end of the talk, if possible. All right, folks. Welcome to Responsible Clouds
and the Green Web Triangle, how to make the climate case for a diverse cloud ecosystem.
I work for the Green Web Foundation.org and the URL for that non-profit is written across
the bottom of this screen, as you can see. In case you can't see me, that's my face.
This is a bit of a hangover from when you're doing remote talks because, yeah, it's weird
being in a room with other people again. I have a background working in wacky environmental
climate, climate tech startups, like as you can see, Loco 2, which is a triple layer pun
around locomotion, low carbon, and like going a local on a crazy holiday. I also worked at
a company called Amy, which stands for Avoid Mass Extinction Engine. We burned through
something in the region of 20 million US dollars of VC money trying to put a carbon footprint
API on anything we could find. These days, I work at the Green Web Foundation, where
we track the transition of the internet away from fossil fuels to something greener. I
also work with the Green Software Foundation, which is a larger industry body, where I'm
the policy chair there. I also run a podcast. I co-host a podcast called Environment Variables.
Get it? Yeah, which is all about green software. I also am a contributing editor to a magazine
called Branch Magazine, which is all about the stuff, this kind of intersection between
climate and tech. This is what we're going to cover today. I'm going to frame a kind
of problem that you might think about when it comes to sovereign tech, sovereign cloud
and sustainability. I'm going to talk a little bit about the drivers for sustainability at
kind of regulatory level that happen in Europe specifically. Then I'm going to kind of talk
about the idea of competing on transparency as a basis for a more diverse cloud ecosystem.
So off we go. Framing the cloud, framing the problem with the Green Web Triangle. Most
of you know that we basically build services by compiling them these days, lots of different
services. So it's a bit like a kind of graph where things people see at the top is actually
comprised of all these things that we might build all the way through that. When you're
trying to actually use a service, you kind of end up with this kind of problem. If you
want to make a service available to other people, or if you want to use a service, there
are kind of like three things you want in my opinion. You want something to be convenient,
like ideally hosted by someone else a lot of the time or at least so you don't have
to be doing all yourself if you're a kind of medium to small size company. You probably
want it to be fossil free because there's a whole kind of climate emergency thing going
on. And ideally you'd like it to be kind of diverse so you're not dependent on only one
provider who can jack up their prices or do all kinds of things that bad things happen
when you're only relying on one provider. And you basically have, I think there are
different failure modes when you think about this triangle because of most of the time
you can only pick two. So for example, let's say you wanted to go for convenient and diverse.
This is like the common thing that a lot of us kind of default to. Like it's basically
the default, it's fossil fuel powered and it's a bit like being in a spaceship that
you know is on fire and then you go to work and you type in a keyboard and you know things
were on fire. Then you go home and you realize things were on fire. Then you feel kind of
a little bit anxious. Unlike people call that climate anxiety. Like that's one of the things
that some of you might feel when you think about this. But on the kind of like global
scale there's an issue there. So that's the thing that we probably are in right now that
we don't want to do all the time. The other one is diverse and fossil free. Maybe you
do care about this and you're going to look for say green providers. But you also care
about having diverse ecosystems and building or everything yourself. This is cool. But
it kind of has another failure mode in that you spend loads and loads of time on undifferentiated
heavy lifting which isn't necessarily creating the kind of value that you're basically employed
for a lot of the time. Or alternatively there is you can go for convenient and fossil free
because lots and lots of large companies now like say Microsoft and Amazon and Google
are telling a really really like loud story about how much they're really kind of like
running on green energy and doing a load load for the climate. Now there are kind of all
kinds of problems which I'm in the middle. I'm in a sovereign cloud dev room where I
don't need to kind of talk too much about. But there is also issues because these folks
tend to be the people who are often the market leaders in helping people get oil and gas out
of the ground and burn it. So even if you're running on say green software like they may
be doing things which you might not be aligned with as an organization or you might feel
somewhat uncomfortable about. So these are the three ways. These are the triangle and
these are the kind of common failure modes that I think that are useful to talk to other
people about and how I explain the problem with basically sustainable digital diverse
services to people who want to actually make a switch and start using something which is
not necessarily a number of really large providers but don't understand why you can't
just move to like next cloud for everything. So that's like the problem that's the triangle.
Now let's talk about the drivers for sustainability in tech at a regulatory level that might kind
of help for some of this. So this graph is from Dr. Robert Rode from Berkeley Earth which
is an environmental data science nonprofit and they're using data from the global carbon
project and what you can see is historically like we've been growing in emissions however
long and you can see this trajectory which people might refer to as business as usual.
There's lots of different scenarios and it's actually titled SSP2. There's a lot of these.
Can you see the kind of changes we would need to actually make to get down to like 1.5 degrees
of global warming which is considered like the least worst option that you will typically
see a lot of the time and this is you might have heard like 1.5 versus or 2 degrees for
example like in 2015 pretty much every country on earth agreed that we should probably do
something about climate and we should go for not more than 2 degrees of warming and then
they actually you had a bunch of people say well actually 2 degrees is still pretty bad
and then we did a bunch of research and found out that yes 1.5 is what we should be thinking
about naturally and despite that we've actually had people thinking okay well what does that
mean for us as a sector as a technology sector and in 2020 you had a bunch of digital and
sustainability focused organizations trying to figure out what that would mean for us
as a sector like how would how would we need to kind of drop our emissions for example
and as you can see this quote that came out when it was issued in this from this press
release basically said yeah to actually have the Paris Agreement which is less ambitious
than that 1.5 thing they basically said you need to halve emissions by 20 you need to
reduce emissions by 45% by 2030 in seven years time so that's basically making reduction
of around 7% each year year on year and well we haven't really been reducing things by
7% each year so it's actually going to be larger so this is basically what the science
is spelling out for us the thing that's quite interesting this year is that you've had people
talking about net zero for a while but now people are starting to actually say well what
does net zero really mean in the context of this science actually and has anyone heard
of the ISO here ISO with standards folks okay they come up with something really interesting
that they published in November they basically said if you want to call something net zero
you actually need to have some teeth behind it and needs to actually mean something now
so while there's been lots and lots of kind of greenwashing net zero targets and things
from those organizations they've basically come out and said actually this is the kind
of stuff you need for net zero now and they've basically said if you have net zero claims
by 2050 without having about anything related to harbing missions by 2030 they're not credible
and if you don't include your supply chain to just only think about your own things rather
than like who made a computer or anything like that not credible and also if you don't
have any interim targets in the next few years also not credible because this is quite important
because seven years is about the same time as the average tenure for a CEO which basically
means you can say oh we're going to be net zero leave then it's someone else's problem
to solve and this is them basically saying actually you need to have something now so
you can't do that kind of stuff. What's also interesting in Europe specifically is the
catchly titled European Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. Basically if you were
in a company which has more than 250 employees you need to be recording and reporting some
information about what your carbon emissions look like and you need to start reporting
in 2024 which means you need to be reporting two months ago to start doing this. So that
is interesting because lots of lots of organizations don't even have a sustainability team and
don't even know how to start reporting this stuff and then finally the IFRS sorry about
all the acronyms these folks are you can think of them as like the pope of accounting right
they're the people who just basically set a decree which everyone then follows in accounting
land. They've basically said that supply chain thing that people talk about yeah actually
we should be doing that and you can't just say about your own organization rather than
all the things you buy from other people for example. So that's what people have been saying
and how are we doing so far like as a tech sector right. So there's good news and there's
bad news all right the good news is is that well we have seen lots and lots of use and
like more people are connected to the internet which I think is in broadly speaking a good
thing and I don't know about you folks but I quite liked having access to the internet
during the pandemic. I think that's been more useful and it'll be a lot more kind of lonely
and sad and cold and everything if I wasn't connected to that and you generally see that
we've basically been using much much more in the way of digital services over the last
say 10 years or so but the growth hasn't been that large really it hasn't been proportional
and there's a number of reasons for this. Let's okay we can just can we just not talk
about cryptocurrency I'm sorry like it's not helping billions of people right the two billion
people who joined the internet pretty sure didn't help two billion people yes using like
about half the impact half the energy of all the data centers on earth all right. So that's
the thing so we're basically going in the direction which is not ideal at the moment
and we need to kind of be reducing this and I guess there are now some companies which
are trying to step up on this and they're trying to basically say well we want to keep
growing which has issues of its own but maybe one thing we can do is actually make the energy
we use greener. So you now see very very large companies like say Google say well 2030 is
an important date we're going to make sure that all of our energy is running on or the
energy we use is coming from green sources 24-7 and 24-7 is important because okay you
know how like you bill for cloud like an hourly basis and there's about maybe 9000 hours
in a year yeah all right. Normally when you look at green energy and people say I'm running
on green energy it's like an average basically saying for all the power I've used if I've
used maybe actually the way I describe it to people is like this we all know that we
should probably get about eight hours of sleep right yeah like a or around that in a 24 hour
period and if I wanted when you normally have green energy right now you can basically say
well I've it's a bit like me saying I'm no only to get eight hours of sleep every night
and I've got a year so what I'm going to do is I'm going to have 3000 hours of sleep at
the beginning of the year all right and then I'm just going to run on red bull and chocolate
bars for the rest of the year and that's going to be sustainable that's kind of like annual
energy balancing that's kind of what the accounting is going to be like and there's more to it
than that but like that's what we currently have at the moment which is why 24-7 is actually
allowable and quite an important goal Microsoft is also doing this they've said well they're
going to run a hundred percent a hundred percent zero coming with zero carbon purchases which
again sounds kind of cool and like these are companies with almost infinite money I say
almost because they use as a basis for firing lots lots of people despite being really really
profitable still but there it turns out that actually you don't need to be a ginormous
company with infinite money to actually kind of set this kind of target and actually be
moving this quickly this is peninsula clean energy they're based in California they're
a small community choice aggregator which is basically a bit like a non-profit energy
company and they've said well actually we think we think we can do it by 2025 because
we built the idea of avoiding an absolute climate kind of crisis into our governance
board basically and we if it makes us slightly less profitable that's okay because we're
not answering to shareholders so they show that they can do that and they've also actually
shared all the actual underlying model in python to show how they actually bought all
their stuff as well so you can actually do this and there's something interesting in
Europe that's happened this in the last week actually do you know how like Elon Musk did
that whole thing where he just cut off API access to Twitter and then everyone's like
oh now this thing I was going to do one like that's a massive enough start using now because
I should be using and I meant to do it anyway right there's this kind of my idea that you
would get around to it kind of the same thing happened with fossil fuels in Europe right
so we basically had this idea where Europe has been using loads of fossil fuels from
Russia and then Russia basically switched off the pipe and now you basically see press
releases like this saying well we've got off Russia we've got off Russian gas folks and
now we've got all this money we can spend on that we would have otherwise spent on on
fossil fuels so it's a bit like lemon and making lemonade but basically the upshot is
that you basically you basically got the European Commission president and the people who essentially
run Europe saying well we've got a quarter of a trillion euros that we would have spent on gas
and now we're planning to spend it on kind of more cool things like net zero technology and like
wind and solar and stuff which I think is actually well I'll take it I suppose all right so that's
kind of what's happening at kind of regulatory level but I think it's quite interesting and
anyway let's talk about competing on transparency for a diverse cloud ecosystem because the thing
is we basically have the science telling us we need to reduce emissions and there are ways
of there are some organizations which start saying yeah we're making all this we're doing
all this kind of big splashy stuff and it's turning up there's more in the way of resources to do
this stuff and there is this kind of narrative in policy circles right now where all the innovation
has to come from very very large companies and I think it's not really true particularly in like
well basic cloud for example there's low all kinds of cool stuff that you see from small providers
in Europe for example so OVH cloud pioneers in say liquid cooling and servers as you can see here
and then we're doing it for ages scale way for like a french cloud provider using arm service
for ages as well like this is the thing that people make a big thing of but it's been like just
standard as well as okay adiabatic cooling is basically using some ideas first developed in
Iran to basically reduce the use of water but still make things cool they basically use it inside
their servers rather than drawing loads and loads of water out of like the local kind of aquifers
this is important because in some parts of the world in there are google data centers which use
the same amount of water as the city they're in basically so like you should be caring about this
kind of stuff and anyway there's loads of other examples that I've listed here I'm sure you can
read them as well and there's also an interest at a kind of regulatory or kind of public sector
level now where people are trying to actually figure out what sustainable software really looks
like and how do you standardize it and how do you procure for this so ocular which was released by
which was kind of celebrated by kde recently they have the first kind of blau angle blue angel kind
of sustainable software kind of certificate which was issued to ocular pdf reader around
september last year and this is interesting because this is the kind of stuff that people
who spend money on trying to actually procure green and actually buy green and digital services
are actually getting now and if you work in a company and you're using some of the large providers
this is important because it turns out to be quite difficult to get the metrics from the very
very big hyperscalers this is a this is actually a table from a person called mark butcher at
positive cloud he shared some of this with me because he was trying to figure out well okay if
you're using these big providers what information can you get from them who wait when they're in
your supply chain that you need to report against and well basically I won't go into all the details
here but the red stuff is bad right so if you're using the stuff on like those two providers
not really a good one even on the left hand side you do see some information so microsoft is probably
one of the better ones right now but they're still there's still some questions about what they report
amazon the the level of reporting they give you is so so so low resolution that you can't tell if
the emissions are coming from like one data center or another data center which is on the other side
of a country thousands of miles away so you have some issues here because you might have one data
center running essentially on coal and you have another data center running on hydropower which
is definitely cleaner than coal all right and you have all this stuff here and this is one thing
that you don't really have access to that if you're going to try and if you need to report you're
going to have to be able to figure out how to actually get these numbers so you can see if you're
making if we're going up or if you're going down like we saw before there's also loads of really
cool open source tooling which makes it possible to get these numbers out so the most well-known one
is cloud carbon footprint this is maintained by ThoughtWorks it plugs into billing APIs from say
amazon from microsoft and google then they do some guesstimates based on available data to tell you
what your figures might be because the various cloud providers have their own native ones which
have very different assumptions to the open ones that you can challenge and you can ask questions
about green coding metrics they did a talk today they basically put if you have a digital service
they'll put every single service in a kind of docker container then track the energy used and
i've got a really nerdy kind of part of a talk that five o'clock later today where i talk about
some of that scaffold i'm not going to pronounce that properly it's a french word for diving helmet
and or diving suit it basically gives you process level energy usage metrics from any machine you
run it on if you have access to the to the bare metal and it spits it out that you can kind of
put into like dashboards and grafana kepler does more or less the same thing but for kubernetes
using Berkeley you know extended Berkeley packet filters that's what they're called right yeah
so that's another thing they do and there's another talk again about that kind of stuff
so there is all this stuff which you can use and plug into your tooling where you can ask
people to use so you can actually get the numbs to show that you're kind of putting us in the
right direction if you're interested in and i think that's my time i'm just going to wrap up
that was a green web triangle there are three things you can have convenient diverse fossil
free most of the time you can only really pick two there's pressure right now to really push
towards fossil free being a key thing which then really makes you decide am i going to be diverse
am i going to be fossil free i mean the other one convenient you can compete on transparency and i
think this is some area that you could actually kind of really kind of lead on and i think this is
actually a way that this is this is probably underexplored right now and finally diverse
ecosystems are healthy ecosystems there's policy support and there's money and there's funding
to make this stuff possible and i think you should do it and i think that there's actually like
even a policy idea around this the kind of word you need to use is twin transitions that's the kind
of pseudo password you need to use when you speak into a policy maker and i think that's it thanks
folks for my time there's a talk about a fossil free internet this talk is online with links to
everything i showed you i'm on mastodon.social and okay there's probably mr chris helms on twitter
but i don't really use it very much but you're welcome to tweet there i suppose and yeah that's
my email address thank you everyone thank you chris um open for questions yes
i'm also in like the element did matrix thing oh so if you've got a question there i'll try and
answer it as well well hello i suppose i waited for some serious questions but i have one maybe
a weird one what do you think about low earth orbit data centers you've talked about data
centers in space that beam things down exactly uh i think they're if there was a way that you could
get them into space without the rockets and you kind of there are actually some ways some wacky
ways to do that i think it'd be cool i think astronomers have really strong opinions about
that and also the whole idea of like privatization of space makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable
because we're not great at dealing with our waste right now and if you have like all the waste that
stops other people trans then i feel like that's maybe not the ideal solution basically also a
little bit worry about having the guy in charge of twitter in charge of the future of space maybe
like let's look at like how it's how he's handling twitter and think we want to kind of
see where that goes i'm not sure about that that's that's my answer i suppose but probably not related
to climate anyone else
hi i just wanted to ask what can you do as a small company 10 to 15 people you are developing
software probably for bigger clients i think what you can do you can write into your contract
actually there's a website called the chance relaying project which has all these clauses
for working with larger companies you can also allocate some of your revenue 1.5 percent of my
revenue for 1.5 percent of us being alive and then use that to allocate that to fund things
either internally making your own sustain your own organization greener or by funding things like
non-profits or groups who are actually pushing for quality change stuff like that i think those are
the things you could do which are easy to like write into a contract which would actually show
that you were demonstrating leadership compared to other people this is also what we do in terms of
training and consulting i'm very happy to chat about that because oh yeah i probably should have
told told you everyone that yeah like this is what we do as well but yeah i'm happy to chat about
that in more in more detail or answer questions on the element and stuff from that okay
thank you hi thank you um you showed a few list of tools that help you get um energy yeah this one
yes um how how much are how precise are they and how much do they go around like how how many
assumptions do they make to get the numbers and what would be needed to don't make assumptions at all
okay someone mentioned ilia before didn't they so ilia was like one of the german cloud providers
i was sorry not cloud provider um energy provider um what we need to do is we need to get carbon
emission figures from the energy providers so like they can tell you how dirty or clean the energy
is at any moment in time so you need that basically scafandra is very very very good because it gives
you very very good numbers but you need hardware support to actually share the information about
this so intel they have something called wrapper which is running average power limit which gives you
idea of the energy used by the cpu but not necessarily the gpu or the disk so you need all
this stuff kind of instrumented for you to get this um kepler uh because you're going into the
kernel you can get really really really detailed information but i'm kind of out of my lay at
my league here because i can write docs but i can't write rust which is why i contribute to docs to
scafandra instead of rust to to just scafandra um greed coding metrics there's also a talk online
where the guy taught where arna turrara he talks about this in really really good detail and he's
actually very very knowledgeable and cloud carbon footprint everything is open source and it's all
in type script where they are very explicit about the assumptions they make all along and they're
also open to pull requests i've committed to code to that one and yeah i haven't committed code to
the other two but um they're cool people and i i i really support the projects i hope that helps
and i'm again happy to chat in more detail thank you cool folks thank you