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by Mateusz Ślaski, Sales Support Engineer, CloudFerro

Making any industry sustainable and more environmentally friendly involves minimizing its influence on the entire environment by:

• Reducing environmental degradation by mining or extracting fuels as resources to build power plants.
• Decreasing:
  • CO2 emissions
  • Water consumption
  • Pollution
  • Ground coverage by installations.

Power consumption

In the cloud industry, we can optimize power consumption in data centers where cloud infrastructure is located. There are many ways to cut down data centers’ power consumption.

Some important examples are:

• Reduction of losses in power infrastructure thanks to:
  • Better efficiency components.
  • Shorter power cables.
  • Location closer to power plants.
• Improving cooling:
  • No mixing of cold and hot air by blanking panels and other ways to force proper airflow through components.
  • Proper cable management not to disturb the airflow.
  • Using liquid cooling.
  • Using controlled variable speed fans.
  • Using heat-proof components that allow operating at higher temperatures.
  • Air-side and water-side economizers.
  • Humidity management.
• Waste heat recovery.
• Hardware optimization:
  • Storage tiers (low performance components for less frequently accessed data, high performance components for frequently accessed data).
  • Use low-energy consumption components.
  • Power consumption monitoring and switching off unused components.
  • Consolidate infrastructure and maximize hardware usage over time.

... and many more not mentioned here.

Resources consumption

Building and equipping data centers involves an entire range of technologies that include:

• Ground preparation.
• Building construction.
• Road construction.
• Power infrastructure.
• Telecommunication infrastructure.
• Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC).
• Water and sewage installations.
• Computer equipment.

Building Power Plants, including renewable ones, such as wind turbines and solar, involves a similar range of environmental impacts.

Savings

Taking into consideration all these aspects, it seems that an eco-friendly data center would be an installation that involves as few resources and energy as possible, used completely. Then, we focus on the last point "Consolidate infrastructure and maximize hardware usage over time" because:

Fewer physical servers in a data center means:

• No resources and energy consumed to manufacture those devices.
• Reduction of space of the Data Center and resources and energy consumed for DC construction.
• Lower maintenance cost.
• Significant power consumption reduction.

In contrast to other resources, computing power in many cases may be consumed 24/7, therefore many cases of time-consuming calculations may be scheduled and batch-executed outside standard working hours. A smaller data center utilized all the time near its 100% safe capacity in the long term will have a lower environmental impact than a bigger one that is used only partially but requires to be powered 24/7.

Solution – spot instances

However, good will is not enough to change businesses to operate in this way. It is necessary to invest time to identify workloads that can be executed in this way and to develop procedures on how to execute and maintain such calculations. The best way to encourage customers to adopt such practices is to provide significantly lower prices for computing resources.

Here come spot instances as “knights on white horses”. Spot virtual machines are:

• Significantly cheaper.
• Do not lock resources for more demanding customers or critical services.

Spot instances - gains and challenges

1. For cloud operators, the gains from spot VMs include:
   • Lower investments in hardware.
   • Lower cost of server room lease or maintenance.
   • More predictable infrastructure load allowing, for example, better agreements with power network operators.

The challenges that cloud operators may face are:

• Lower SPOT prices bring lower income.
• Shorter service windows.
• Single failures may strongly influence customers.

2. What customers gain from using spot instances are:
   • Significantly lower prices for cloud computing.
   • Huge capacity workloads processed in the evenings and nights could be done faster than doing this during working hours with human supervision.

Challenges facing customers are:

• Need to learn to do processing as batch workloads.
• Have to divide own resources into critical ones executed on on-demand instances and those that may be interrupted to run on SPOT instances.

3. For everyone and our planet:

Gains:

• Overall less power consumption on running cloud infrastructure.
• Less carbon footprint on infrastructure manufacturing.
• Less natural resource consumption to build server rooms and produce hardware.

Want to learn how to start using spot instances? Read a short guide How to use Spot Virtual Machines.