Falling in with the wrong cloud?

Will Greenpeace's damning report on electricity use of leading internet firms impact which cloud vendors UK suppliers side with?

Greenpeace has been accused of missing the bigger picture after it mauled the eco credentials of some of the leading cloud computing brands.

In its Clicking Clean report, which evaluated the energy supply chains of 19 leading internet companies, Greenpeace blasted Amazon Web Services (AWS), Twitter and a number of other cloud players for operating "dirty" clouds.

But some proponents of cloud have hit back, arguing the environmental group should be focusing its wrath on the 90 per cent of compute infrastructure that remains in small, inefficient in-house datacentres.

Greenpeace's findings certainly appear damning for AWS, the undisputed public cloud leader, with quarterly revenue now tracking above $900m (£538m), according to analyst Synergy Research, more than its four closest rivals - Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM and Google - combined.

AWS currently sources just 15 per cent of its electricity demand from clean energy suppliers, Greenpeace estimated, with coal powering 28 per cent of its cloud, nuclear 27 per cent and gas 25 per cent.

In contrast, Apple, Facebook and Google were all praised for moving towards powering their datacentres with 100 per cent renewable energy.

"By continuing to buy dirty energy, AWS not only can't seem to keep up with Apple, but is dragging much of the internet down with it," Greenpeace IT analyst Gary Cook stated, noting that AWS provides hosting to household names such as Pinterest, Netflix, Spotify and Tumblr.

The stakes are high, Greenpeace emphasised, claiming that, if the internet were a country, its electricity demand would rank sixth in the world.
AWS itself was quick to reject the findings of the report, arguing that running

IT infrastructure on its cloud is "inherently more energy efficient than traditional computing that depends on small, inefficient and over-provisioned datacentres".

"Collectively, AWS customers are the driving force in this effort by eliminating hundreds of thousands of individual datacentres worldwide, along with the associated wasted capacity and overprovisioned energy," it said.

Although AWS dismissed Greenpeace's data on its energy consumption as "inaccurate", it declined to elaborate.

But some UK cloud brokers we caught up with had some sympathy with the cloud giant's defence, and questioned the extent to which the report would resonate with end users.

Missing the bigger picture?

Pontus Noren, director of CloudReach, a UK cloud computing consultancy which partners with both AWS and Google, agreed the research was a "great headline grabber", but accused Greenpeace of "missing the bigger picture".

"Firstly, if our customers are picking between two clouds, they don't often ask which is greener," he said. "It's not that they don't care, but it's not a criterion they list.

"But secondly, whatever cloud people use, you're typically moving people off poorly run datacentres with average or low utilisation of equipment. Going to cloud is a green alternative, full stop."

Noren estimated that - despite cloud computing's frenetic growth - just 10 to 15 per cent of all infrastructure available today is cloud based.

"What about the other 85 to 90 per cent?" he said. "That is the big question: how quickly can we get corporations running poorly utilised internal datacentres to use the cloud. Shared infrastructure inherently has much higher utilisation and therefore gives a much greater impact on the negative effect of IT on the environment."

Robin Meehan, chief technology officer at Smart421 (pictured), another AWS partner and cloud consultancy, was also reluctant to join in the Amazon bashing.

"I think the report made some good points - clearly the direction of travel is towards cloud, so to be looking into the green credentials of those large datacentres is a valid research topic," he said.

"But if we are responding to a customer RFI or RFP, it doesn't really appear on customers' scoring sheets. There is a supply side to this argument, and a demand side. The customer demand has to be there to drive the market in a greener direction."

AWS emphasised that it operates carbon-free datacentres in two of its 10 global regions: the US state of Oregon and its GovCloud operation, which is aimed mainly at US public sector customers.

Meehan said AWS should be given more credit on this front, claiming its Oregon region is a viable option for UK customers concerned about their carbon footprint.

"If a customer comes to us wanting to run 100 per cent neutral from a carbon perspective, and if they can live with having their data in the US, we can do that today," he said. "It's the same price as US East and in availability terms there are three different datacentres in Oregon so you can deploy a very resilient solution with failover between three datacentres."

Meehan agreed that the move to cloud is intrinsically environmentally beneficial.

"The movement from numerous, sub-scale deployments to fewer, larger and ultimately more efficient deployments is a key trend that supports the green agenda," he said.

Efficiency does not equal green

However, Greenpeace's Cook stuck to his guns when we asked him for a response to AWS' comments, arguing that the higher server utilisation rates typically achieved when moving resources to the cloud are only a part of the puzzle.

"We have certainly heard this argument before, but fortunately most companies have moved on from arguing that efficiency equals green," Cook told CRN.

"Cloud/shared infrastructure certainly has the potential to achieve higher server utilisation rates. But being more efficient is only part of the equation - what is producing the energy is a critical part of the equation.

"The fact that we can find other compute resources that are less efficient does not give Amazon or any other company licence to ignore looking at the source of power for their rapid and energy-intensive growth, and how clean or dirty the energy is."

Greenpeace's scrutiny of centralised and shared compute infrastructure is further warranted by the "explosive growth" the sector is experiencing, Cook added.

AWS was not the only tech giant savaged by Greenpeace, with Twitter also scolded for not sharing any details about its energy footprint or making any efforts to procure cleaner electricity. Transparency across the sector remains "weak" overall, the NGO added, particularly among colocation providers.

But Greenpeace emphasised that a number of leading datacentre operators had taken strides towards building a green internet since its last report on the topic in 2012.

"Major brands are taking meaningful steps to steer their infrastructure investments toward cleaner energy, but the sector as a whole remains focused on rapid growth," Greenpeace stated.

"Most companies still are myopic to the critical nature of their energy choices, focusing only on maximising efficiency. The replacement of dirty sources of electricity with clean renewable sources is still the crucial missing link in the sector's sustainability efforts."

Clean angels and dirty demons

AWS: "Unfortunately, despite its dominant position and well-established business model, AWS has dropped further and further behind its competitors in building an internet that runs on renewable sources of energy, and is the least transparent of any company we evaluated."
Clean energy index 15 %

APPLE: "Apple's commitment to renewable energy has helped set a new bar for the industry, illustrating in very concrete terms that a 100 per cent renewable internet is within its reach." Clean energy index 100 %

GOOGLE: "Google has continued to lead the major internet brands in purchasing renewable energy at scale to power its massive online ecosystem." Clean energy index 48%

IBM: "As it continues to scale its investments in cloud-related infrastructure, IBM needs to identify how it will secure a renewable electricity supply, and use its influence to demand clean energy and boost its direct renewable energy purchasing in the US." Clean energy index 18%

MICROSOFT: "To achieve its goal of becoming ‘carbon neutral' virtually overnight, Microsoft has thus far relied heavily on buying Renewable Energy Credits and carbon offsets, creating the appearance on paper of being clean but not altering Microsoft's status quo supply of dirty electricity." Clean energy index 29%