walshCarbonBenefitsCloud2020#

Wal20

Noelle Walsh. The Carbon Benefits of Cloud Computing: a Study of the Microsoft Cloud. Technical Report, Microsoft, 2020. URL: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=56950 (visited on 2023-01-30).

Summary

Azure cloud is between 22% and 93% more energy efficient than traditional on-premise datacenters. They identify 4 reasons why azure cloud is better in terms of sustainability than on-premise computing:

  1. IT operational efficiency.

    • Dynamic provisioning

    • Multi-tenancy

  2. IT equipment efficiency

  3. Datacenter infrastructure efficiency

  4. Renewable electricity

Snippets#

Analyzed the following Azure services:

  • Azure Compute

  • Azure Storage

  • Exchange Online

  • SharePoint Online

Key parameters considered in the analysis included:

  • Equipment counts and specifications.

  • Device utilization.

  • Power draw of servers, storage devices, and networking equipment used within the datacenters.

  • Power usage effectiveness (PUE) of datacenters hosting the services.

  • Data flows over the internet.

  • Carbon intensity of electricity supply.

Model exclusions#

Unless otherwise noted, the following are excluded given their negligible impact:

  • Embedded carbon in the building, including cooling and air conditioning equipment.

  • Microsoft corporate overhead, including administration and software development.

  • Upstream emissions from extracting the fuel used to power the electric grid.

  • Embedded emissions for certain IT equipment not exclusively used by the modeled service, such as datacenter switches not located in the server racks.

End-of-life disposal#

  • End-of-life disposal includes emissions associated with landfill and recycling for servers, hard disk drives, and network switches.

  • The model assumes a conservative recycling rate of 20 percent. Even with a low assumed recycling rate, these emissions are negative due to the credit based on avoided use of virgin material from recycling.

  • End-of-life emissions are amortized over the assumed lifetime of the device.

Results#

The results show that Azure Compute is 52-79 percent more energy efficient than compute equivalents deployed in traditional enterprise datacenters […], depending on the type of enterprise deployment.

When renewable energy is taken into account, carbon emissions from Azure Compute are 92-98 percent lower than traditional enterprise datacenter deployments of compute equivalents

The results show that Azure Storage is 71-79 percent more energy efficient than storage equivalents deployed in traditional enterprise datacenters […], depending on the type of enterprise deployment.

When renewable energy is taken into account, carbon emissions from Azure Storage are 79-83 percent lower than traditional enterprise datacenter deployments of storage equivalents

Wim

Exchange and Sharepoint show similar improvements, but are less relevant for this research.