davidmytton / paper-assessing-ghg-protocol-for-public-cloud

Article source: Mytton, D. Assessing the suitability of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol for calculation of emissions from public cloud computing workloads. Journal of Cloud Computing 9, 45 (2020) DOI: 10.1186/s13677-020-00185-8.

Assessing the suitability of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol for calculation of emissions from public cloud computing workloads

https://doi.org/10.1186/s13677-020-00185-8

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Abstract

Efficiency improvements over the past decade have meant that data center energy usage has decoupled from the growth in IT workloads. Much of this efficiency improvement has been attributed to innovations made by “hyperscale” public cloud vendors, where a large proportion of new IT workloads are now being deployed. However, the move to the cloud is making it more difficult to assess the environmental impact of workloads deployed there. Although the large cloud vendors are amongst the largest purchasers of renewable electricity, customers do not have access to the data they need to complete emissions assessments under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. Data such as Power Usage Effectiveness, emissions factors and equipment embodied energy are not available from public cloud vendors. This paper demonstrates how the Greenhouse Gas Protocol method of assessment of IT emissions does not work for public cloud environments and suggests how this can be tackled by the cloud vendors themselves.

Citation

Mytton, D. Assessing the suitability of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol for calculation of emissions from public cloud computing workloads. Journal of Cloud Computing 9, 45 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13677-020-00185-8

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This article is published under the CC-BY-4.0 license. Copies of the references in this repository are subject to their original content licenses and are included here under fair-use provisions for education.