Tag Archives: Sustainability

Optimizing your AWS Infrastructure for Sustainability, Part III: Networking

Post Syndicated from Katja Philipp original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/optimizing-your-aws-infrastructure-for-sustainability-part-iii-networking/

In Part I: Compute and Part II: Storage of this series, we introduced strategies to optimize the compute and storage layer of your AWS architecture for sustainability.

This blog post focuses on the network layer of your AWS infrastructure and proposes concepts to optimize your network utilization.

Optimizing the networking layer of your AWS infrastructure

When you make your applications available to more customers, the packets that travel across the network will increase. Similarly, the larger the size of data, as well as the more distance a packet has to travel, the more resources are required to transmit it. With growing number of application users, optimizing network traffic can ensure that network resource consumption is not growing linearly.

The recommendations in the following sections will help you use your resources more efficiently for the network layer of your workload.

Reducing the network traveled per request

Reducing the data sent over the network and optimizing the path a packet takes will result in a more efficient data transfer. The following table provides metrics related to some AWS services that can help you find potential network optimization opportunities.

Service Metric/Check Source
Amazon CloudFront Cache hit rate Viewing CloudFront and Lambda@Edge metrics
AWS Trusted Advisor check reference
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) Data transferred in/out of a bucket Metrics and dimensions
AWS Trusted Advisor check reference
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) NetworkPacketsIn/NetworkPacketsOut List the available CloudWatch metrics for your instances
AWS Trusted Advisor CloudFront Content Delivery Optimization AWS Trusted Advisor check reference

We recommend the following concepts to optimize your network utilization.

Read local, write global

The following strategies allow users to read the data from the source closest to them; thus, fewer requests travel longer distances.

  • If you are operating within a single AWS Region, you should choose a Region that is near the majority of your users. The further your users are away from the Region, the further data needs to travel through the global network.
  • If your users are spread over multiple Regions, set up multiple copies of the data to reside in each Region. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and Amazon Aurora let you set up cross-Region read replicas. Amazon DynamoDB global tables allow for fast performance and alleviate network load.

Use a content delivery network

Content delivery networks (CDNs) bring your data closer to the end user. When requested, they cache static content from the original server and deliver it to the user. This shortens the distance each packet has to travel.

  • CloudFront optimizes network utilization and delivers traffic over CloudFront’s globally distributed edge network. Figure 1 shows a global user base that accesses an S3 bucket directly versus serving cached data from edge locations.
  • Trusted Advisor includes a check that recommends whether you should use a CDN for your S3 buckets. It analyzes the data transferred out of your S3 bucket and flags the buckets that could benefit from a CloudFront distribution.
Comparison of accessing an S3 bucket directly versus via a CloudFront distribution/edge locations

Figure 1. Comparison of accessing an S3 bucket directly versus via a CloudFront distribution/edge locations

Optimize CloudFront cache hit ratio

CloudFront caches different versions of an object depending upon the request headers (for example, language, date, or user-agent). You can further optimize your CDN distribution’s cache hit ratio (the number of times an object is served from the CDN versus from the origin) with a Trusted Advisor check. It automatically checks for headers that do not affect the object and then recommends a configuration to ignore those headers and not forward the request to the origin.

Use edge-oriented services

Edge computing brings data storage and computation closer to users. By implementing this approach, you can perform data preprocessing or run machine learning algorithms on the edge.

  • Edge-oriented services applied on gateways or directly onto user devices reduce network traffic because data does not need to be sent back to the cloud server.
  • One-time, low-latency tasks are a good fit for edge use cases, like when an autonomous vehicle needs to detect objects nearby. You should generally archive data that needs to be accessed by multiple parties in the cloud, but consider factors such as device hardware and privacy regulations first.
  • CloudFront Functions can run compute on edge locations and Lambda@Edge can generate Regional edge caches. AWS IoT Greengrass provides edge computing for Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

Reducing the size of data transmitted

Serve compressed files

In addition to caching static assets, you can further optimize network utilization by serving compressed files to your users. You can configure CloudFront to automatically compress objects, which results in faster downloads, leading to faster rendering of webpages.

Enhance Amazon EC2 network performance

Network packets consist of data that you are sending (frame) and the processing overhead information. If you use larger packets, you can pass more data in a single packet and decrease processing overhead.

Jumbo frames use the largest permissible packet that can be passed over the connection. Keep in mind that outside a single virtual private cloud (VPC), over virtual private network (VPN) or internet gateway, traffic is limited to a lower frame regardless of using jumbo frames.

Optimize APIs

If your payloads are large, consider reducing their size to reduce network traffic by compressing your messages for your REST API payloads. Use the right endpoint for your use case. Edge-optimized API endpoints are best suited for geographically distributed clients. Regional API endpoints are best suited for when you have a few clients with higher demands, because they can help reduce connection overhead. Caching your API responses will reduce network traffic and enhance responsiveness.

Conclusion

As your organization’s cloud adoption grows, knowing how efficient your resources are is crucial when optimizing your AWS infrastructure for environmental sustainability. Using the fewest number of resources possible and using them to their fullest will have the lowest impact on the environment.

Throughout this three-part blog post series, we introduced you to the following architectural concepts and metrics for the compute, storage, and network layers of your AWS infrastructure.

  • Reducing idle resources and maximizing utilization
  • Shaping demand to existing supply
  • Managing your data’s lifecycle
  • Using different storage tiers
  • Optimizing the path data travels through a network
  • Reducing the size of data transmitted

This is not an exhaustive list. We hope it is a starting point for you to consider the environmental impact of your resources and how you can build your AWS infrastructure to be more efficient and sustainable. Figure 2 shows an overview of how you can monitor related metrics with CloudWatch and Trusted Advisor.

Overview of services that integrate with CloudWatch and Trusted Advisor for monitoring metrics

Figure 2. Overview of services that integrate with CloudWatch and Trusted Advisor for monitoring metrics

Ready to get started? Check out the AWS Sustainability page to find out more about our commitment to sustainability. It provides information about renewable energy usage, case studies on sustainability through the cloud, and more.

Other blog posts in this series

Related information

Optimizing your AWS Infrastructure for Sustainability, Part II: Storage

Post Syndicated from Katja Philipp original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/optimizing-your-aws-infrastructure-for-sustainability-part-ii-storage/

In Part I of this series, we introduced you to strategies to optimize the compute layer of your AWS architecture for sustainability. We provided you with success criteria, metrics, and architectural patterns to help you improve resource and energy efficiency of your AWS workloads.

This blog post focuses on the storage layer of your AWS infrastructure and provides recommendations that you can use to store your data sustainably.

Optimizing the storage layer of your AWS infrastructure

Managing your data lifecycle and using different storage tiers are key components to optimizing storage for sustainability. When you consider different storage mechanisms, remember that you’re introducing a trade-off between resource efficiency, access latency, and reliability. This means you’ll need to select your management pattern accordingly.

Reducing idle resources and maximizing utilization

Storing and accessing data efficiently, in addition to reducing idle storage resources results in a more efficient and sustainable architecture. Amazon CloudWatch offers storage metrics that can be used to assess storage improvements, as listed in the following table.

Service Metric Source
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) BucketSizeBytes Metrics and dimensions
S3 Object Access Logging requests using server access logging
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) VolumeIdleTime Amazon EBS metrics
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) StorageBytes Amazon CloudWatch metrics for Amazon EFS
Amazon FSx for Lustre FreeDataStorageCapacity Monitoring Amazon FSx for Lustre
Amazon FSx for Windows File Server FreeStorageCapacity Monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch

You can monitor these metrics with the architecture shown in Figure 1. CloudWatch provides a unified view of your resource metrics.

CloudWatch for monitoring your storage resources

Figure 1. CloudWatch for monitoring your storage resources

In the following sections, we present four concepts to reduce idle resources and maximize utilization for your AWS storage layer.

Analyze data access patterns and use storage tiers

Choosing the right storage tier after analyzing data access patterns gives you more sustainable storage options in the cloud.

  • By storing less volatile data on technologies designed for efficient long-term storage, you will optimize your storage footprint. More specifically, you’ll reduce the impact you have on the lifetime of storage resources by storing slow-changing or unchanging data on magnetic storage, as opposed to solid state memory. For archiving data or storing slow-changing data, consider using Amazon EFS Infrequent Access, Amazon EBS Cold HDD volumes, and Amazon S3 Glacier.
  • To store your data efficiently throughout its lifetime, create an Amazon S3 Lifecycle configuration that automatically transfers objects to a different storage class based on your pre-defined rules. The Expiring Amazon S3 Objects Based on Last Accessed Date to Decrease Costs blog post shows you how to create custom object expiry rules for Amazon S3 based on the last accessed date of the object.
  • For data with unknown or changing access patterns, use Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering to monitor access patterns and move objects among tiers automatically. In general, you have to make a trade-off between resource efficiency, access latency, and reliability when considering these storage mechanisms. Figure 2 shows an overview of data access patterns for Amazon S3 and the resulting storage tier. For example, in S3 One Zone-IA, energy and server capacity are reduced, because data is stored only within one Availability Zone.
Data access patterns for Amazon S3

Figure 2. Data access patterns for Amazon S3

Use columnar data formats and compression

Columnar data formats like Parquet and ORC require less storage capacity compared to row-based formats like CSV and JSON.

  • Parquet consumes up to six times less storage in Amazon S3 compared to text formats. This is because of features such as column-wise compression, different encodings, or compression based on data type, as shown in the Top 10 Performance Tuning Tips for Amazon Athena blog post.
  • You can improve performance and reduce query costs of Amazon Athena by 30–90 percent by compressing, partitioning, and converting your data into columnar formats. Using columnar data formats and compressions reduces the amount of data scanned.

Reduce unused storage resources

Right size or delete unused storage volumes

As shown in the Cost Optimization on AWS video, right-sizing storage by data type and usage reduces your associated costs by up to 50 percent.

  • A straightforward way to reduce unused storage resources is to delete unattached EBS volumes. If the volume needs to be quickly restored later on, you can store an Amazon EBS snapshot before deletion.
  • You can also use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager to retain and delete EBS snapshots and Amazon EBS-backed Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) automatically. This further reduces the storage footprint of stale resources.
  • To avoid over-provisioning volumes, see the Automating Amazon EBS Volume-resizing blog post. It demonstrates an automated workflow that can expand a volume every time it reaches a capacity threshold. These Amazon EBS elastic volumes extend a volume when needed, as shown in the Amazon EBS Update blog post.
  • Another way to optimize block storage is to identify volumes that are underutilized and downsize them. Or you can change the volume type, as shown in the AWS Storage Optimization whitepaper.

Modify the retention period of CloudWatch Logs

By default, CloudWatch Logs are kept indefinitely and never expire. You can adjust the retention policy for each log group to be between one day and 10 years. For compliance reasons, export log data to Amazon S3 and use archival storage such as Amazon S3 Glacier.

Deduplicate data

Large datasets often have redundant data, which increases your storage footprint.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we discussed data storing techniques to increase your storage efficiency. These include right-sizing storage volumes; choosing storage tiers depending on different data access patterns; and compressing and converting data.

These techniques allow you to optimize your AWS infrastructure for environmental sustainability.

This blog post is the second post in the series, you can find the first part of the series linked in the following section. In the next part of this blog post series, we will show you how you can optimize the networking part of your IT infrastructure for sustainability in the cloud!

Related information

Introducing Greencloud

Post Syndicated from Annika Garbers original https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-greencloud/

Introducing Greencloud

Introducing Greencloud

Over the past few days, as part of Cloudflare’s Impact Week, we’ve written about the work we’re doing to help build a greener Internet. We’re making bold climate commitments for our own network and facilities and introducing new capabilities that help customers understand and reduce their impact. And in addition to organization-level initiatives, we also recognize the importance of individual impact — which is why we’re excited to publicly introduce Greencloud, our sustainability-focused employee working group.

What is Greencloud?

Greencloud is a coalition of Cloudflare employees who are passionate about the environment. Initially founded in 2019, we’re a cross-functional, global team with a few areas of focus:

  1. Awareness: Greencloud compiles and shares resources about environmental activism with each other and the broader organization. We believe that collective action — not just conscious consumerism, but also engagement in local policy and community movements — is critical to a more sustainable future, and that the ability to affect change starts with education. We’re also consistently inspired by the great work other folks in tech are doing in this space, and love sharing updates from peers that push us to do better within our own spheres of influence.
  2. Support: Our membership includes Cloudflare team members from across the org chart, which enables us to be helpful in supporting multidisciplinary projects led by functional teams within Cloudflare.
  3. Advocacy: We recognize the importance of both individual and organization-level action. We continue to challenge ourselves, each other and the broader organization to think about environmental impact in every decision we make as a company.

Our vision is to contribute on every level to addressing the climate crisis and creating a more sustainable future, helping Cloudflare become a clear leader in sustainable practices among tech companies. Moreover, we want to empower our colleagues to make more sustainable decisions in each of our individual lives.

What has Greencloud done so far?

Since launching in 2019, Greencloud has created a space for conversation and idea generation around Cloudflare’s sustainability initiatives, many of which have been implemented across our organization. As a group, we’ve created content to educate ourselves and external audiences about a broad range of sustainability topics:

  • Benchmarked Cloudflare’s sustainability practices against peer companies to understand our baseline and source ideas for improvement.
  • Curated guides for colleagues on peer-reviewed content, product recommendations, and “low-hanging fruit” actions we all have the ability to take, such as choosing a sustainable 401k investment plan and using a paperless option for all employee documents.
  • Hosted events such as sustainability-themed trivia/quiz nights to spark discussion and teach participants techniques for making more sustainable decisions in our own homes and lives.

In addition to creating “evergreen” resources and hosting events, Greencloud threw a special celebration for April 22, 2021 — the 51st global Earth Day. For the surrounding week, we hosted a series of events to engage our employees and community in sustainability education and actions.

Greencloud TV Takeover

You can catch reruns of our Earth Week content on Cloudflare TV, covering a broad range of topics:

Tuesday: Infrastructure
A chat with Michael Aylward, Head of Cloudflare’s Network Partners Program and renewable energy expert, about the carbon footprint of Internet infrastructure. We explored how the Internet contributes to climate change and what tech companies, including Cloudflare, are doing to minimize this footprint.

Wednesday: Policy
An interview with Doug Kramer, Cloudflare’s General Counsel, and Patrick Day, Cloudflare’s Senior Policy Counsel, on the overlap between sustainability, tech, and public policy. We dove into how tech companies, including Cloudflare, are working with policymakers to build a more sustainable future.

Thursday: Cloudflare and the Climate
Francisco Ponce de León interviewed Sagar Aryal, the CTO of Plant for the Planet, an organization of young Climate Justice Ambassadors with the goal of planting one trillion trees. Plant for the Planet is a participant in Project Galileo, Cloudflare’s program providing free protection for at-risk public interest groups.

In addition, Amy Bibeau, our Greencloud Places team lead, interviewed Cloudflare’s Head Of Real Estate and Workplace Operations, Caroline Quick and LinkedIn’s Dana Jennings, Senior Project Manager, Global Sustainability for a look into the opportunities and challenges around creating sustainable workplaces. Like most companies, Cloudflare is re-thinking what our workplace will look like post-COVID.  Baking sustainability into those plans, and being a model for other companies, can be game changing.

Friday: Personal Impact & Trivia
A panel of Greencloud employees addressed the challenge of personal versus collective/system-level action and broke down some of the highest value actions we’re working on taking in our own lives.

Finally, Greencloud took over Cloudflare TV’s signature game show Silicon Valley Squares with Earth Day-themed questions!

Get engaged

No one person, group, or organization working alone can save our planet — the degree of collective action required to reverse climate change is staggering, but we’re excited and inspired by the work that leaders across every industry are pitching in every day. We’d love for you and/or your organization to join us in this calling to create a more sustainable planet and tell us about your initiatives to exchange ideas.

Helping build a green Internet

Post Syndicated from Matthew Prince original https://blog.cloudflare.com/helping-build-a-green-internet/

Helping build a green Internet

Helping build a green Internet

When we started Cloudflare, we weren’t thinking about minimizing the environmental impact of the Internet. Frankly, I didn’t really think of the Internet as having much of an environmental impact. It was just this magical resource that gave access to information and services from anywhere.

But that was before I started racking servers in hyper-cooled data centers. Before Cloudflare started paying the bills to keep those servers powered up and cooled down. Before we became obsessed with maximizing the number of requests we could process per watt of power. And long before we started buying directly from renewable power suppliers to drive down the cost of electricity across our network.

Today, I have a very good understanding of how much power it takes to run the Internet. It therefore wasn’t surprising to read the Boston Consulting Group study which found that 2% of all carbon output, about 1 billion metric tons per year, is attributable to the Internet. That’s the equivalent of the entire aviation industry.

Cloudflare: Accidentally Environmentally Friendly By Design

While we didn’t set out to reduce the environmental impact of the Internet, Cloudflare has always had efficiency at its core. It comes from our ongoing fight with an old nemesis: the speed of light.

Because we knew we couldn’t beat the speed of light, in order to make our network fast we needed to get close to where Internet users were. In order to do that, we needed to partner directly with ISPs around the world so they’d allow us to install our gear directly inside their networks. In order to do that, we needed to make our gear as low power as possible. And we needed to invent network technology to spread load around our network to deal with spikes of traffic — whether because of a cyber attack or a sale on an exclusive new sneaker line — and to efficiently use all available capacity.

Fighting for Efficiency

When back in December 2012, just two years after we launched, I traveled to Intel’s Oregon Research Center to talk to their senior engineering team about how we needed server chips with more cores per watt, I wasn’t thinking we needed it to save the environment. Instead, I was trying to figure out how we could build equipment that was power efficient enough that ISPs wouldn’t object to installing it. Unfortunately, Intel told me that I was worrying about the wrong thing. So that’s when we started looking for alternatives, including the very power-efficient Arm.

But, it turns out, our obsession with efficiency has made Cloudflare the environmental choice in cloud computing. A 2015 study by Anders S. G. Andrae and Tomas Edler estimated the average cost of processing a byte of information online. Even accounting for the efficiency gains across the industry, based on the study’s data our best estimates are that Cloudflare data processing is more than 19 times more efficient.

Serve Local

The imperfect analogy that I like is buying from the local farmers’ market versus the big box retailer. By serving requests locally, and not backhauling them around the world to massive data centers, Cloudflare is able to reduce the environmental impact of our customers on the Internet. In 2020, we estimate that our customers reduced their carbon output by 550,000 metric tons versus if they had not used our services. That’s the equivalent of eliminating 635 million miles driven by passenger cars last year.

Helping build a green Internet

We’re proud of that, but it’s still a tiny percentage of the overall impact the Internet still has on the environment. As we thought about Impact Week, we set out to make reducing the environmental impact of the Internet a top priority. Given today more than 1 in 6 websites uses Cloudflare, we’re in a position where changes we make can have a meaningful impact.

We Can Do More

Starting today, we’re announcing four major initiatives to reduce Cloudflare’s environmental impact and help the Internet as a whole be more environmentally friendly.

First, we’re committing to be carbon neutral by 2022. We already extensively use renewable energy to power our global network, but we’re going to expand that usage to cover 100% of our energy use. But we’re going a step further. We’re going to look back over the 11 years since Cloudflare launched and purchase offsets to zero out all of Cloudflare’s historical carbon output from powering our global network. It’s not enough that we have less impact than others, we want to make sure Cloudflare since our beginning has been a net positive for the planet.

Second, we are ramping up our deployment of a new class of hyper-efficient servers. Based on Arm technology, these servers can perform the same amount of work while using half the energy. We are hopeful that by prioritizing energy efficiency in the server market we can help catalyze more chip manufacturers to release more efficient designs.

Third, we’re releasing a new option for Cloudflare Workers and Pages, our computing platform and JAMStack offering, which allows developers to choose to run their workloads in the most energy efficient data centers. We believe we are the first major cloud computing vendor to offer developers a way to optimize for the environment. The Green Workers option won’t cost anymore. The tradeoff will be that workloads may incur a bit of additional network latency, but we believe for many developers that’s a tradeoff they’ll be willing to make.

New Standards and Partnerships to Eliminate Excessive Emissions

Finally, and maybe most ambitiously, we’re working with a number of the leading search and crawl companies to introduce an open standard to minimize the amount of load from excessive crawl as possible. Nearly half of all Internet traffic is automated. The majority of that is malicious, and Cloudflare is designed to stop that as efficiently as possible.

But more than 5% of all Internet traffic is generated by legitimate crawlers which index the web in order to power services we all rely on like search. The problem is, more than half of that legitimate crawl traffic is redundant — reindexing pages that haven’t changed. If we can eliminate redundant crawl, it’d be the equivalent of planting a new 30 million acres of forest. That’s a goal worth striving for.

When we started Cloudflare we weren’t thinking about how we could reduce the Internet’s environmental impact. But that’s changed. Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. And a better Internet is clearly a more environmentally friendly Internet.

Announcing Green Compute on Cloudflare Workers

Post Syndicated from Aly Cabral original https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-green-compute/

Announcing Green Compute on Cloudflare Workers

Announcing Green Compute on Cloudflare Workers

All too often we are confronted with the choice to move quickly or act responsibly. Whether the topic is safety, security, or in this case sustainability, we’re asked to make the trade off of halting innovation to protect ourselves, our users, or the planet. But what if that didn’t always need to be the case? At Cloudflare, our goal is to bring sustainable computing to you without the need for any additional time, work, or complexity.

Enter Green Compute on Cloudflare Workers.

Green Compute can be enabled for any Cron triggered Workers. The concept is simple: when turned on, we’ll take your compute workload and run it exclusively on parts of our edge network located in facilities powered by renewable energy. Even though all of Cloudflare’s edge network is powered by renewable energy already, some of our data centers are located in third-party facilities that are not 100% powered by renewable energy. Green Compute takes our commitment to sustainability one step further by ensuring that not only our network equipment but also the building facility as a whole are powered by renewable energy. There are absolutely no code changes needed. Now, whether you need to update a leaderboard every five minutes or do DNA sequencing directly on our edge (yes, that’s a real use case!), you can minimize the impact of any scheduled work, regardless of how complex or energy intensive.

How it works

Cron triggers allow developers to set time-based invocations for their Workers. These Workers happen on a recurring schedule, as opposed to being triggered by application users via HTTP requests. Developers specify a job schedule in familiar cron syntax either through wrangler or within the Workers Dashboard. To set up a scheduled job, first create a Worker that performs a periodic task, then navigate to the ‘Triggers’ tab to define a Cron Trigger.

Announcing Green Compute on Cloudflare Workers

The great thing about cron triggered Workers is that there is no human on the other side waiting for a response in real time. There is no end user we need to run the job close to. Instead, these Workers are scheduled to run as (often computationally expensive) background jobs making them a no-brainer candidate to run exclusively on sustainable hardware, even when that hardware isn’t the closest to your user base.

Cloudflare’s massive global network is logically one distributed system with all the parts connected, secured, and trusted. Because our network works as a single system, as opposed to a system with logically isolated regions, we have the flexibility to seamlessly move workloads around the world keeping your impact goals in mind without any additional management complexity for you.

Announcing Green Compute on Cloudflare Workers

When you set up a Cron Trigger with Green Compute enabled, the Cloudflare network will route all scheduled jobs to green energy hardware automatically, without any application changes needed. To turn on Green Compute today, signup for our beta.

Real world use

If you haven’t ever had the pleasure of writing a cron job yourself, you might be wondering — what do you use scheduled compute for anyway?

There are a wide range of periodic maintenance tasks necessary to power any application. In my working life, I’ve built a scheduled job that ran every minute to monitor the availability of the system I was responsible for, texting me if any service was unavailable. In another instance, a job ran every five mins, keeping the core database and search feature in sync by pulling all new application data, transforming it, then inserting into a search database. In yet another example, a periodic job ran every half hour to iterate over all user sessions and cleanup sessions that were no longer active.

Scheduled jobs are the backbone of real world systems. Now, with Green Compute on Cloudflare Workers all these real world systems and their computationally expensive background maintenance tasks, can take advantage of running compute exclusively on machines powered by renewable energy.

The Green Network

Our mission at Cloudflare is to help you tackle your sustainability goals. Today, with the launch of the Carbon Impact Report we gave you visibility into your environmental impact. The collaboration with the Green Web Foundation gave green hosting certification for Cloudflare Pages. And our launch of Green Compute on Cloudflare Workers allows you to exclusively run on hardware powered by renewable energy. And the best part? No additional system complexity is required for any of the above.

Cloudflare is focused on making it easy to hit your ambitious goals. We are just getting started.

Designing Edge Servers with Arm CPUs to Deliver 57% More Performance Per Watt

Post Syndicated from Nitin Rao original https://blog.cloudflare.com/designing-edge-servers-with-arm-cpus/

Designing Edge Servers with Arm CPUs to Deliver 57% More Performance Per Watt

Designing Edge Servers with Arm CPUs to Deliver 57% More Performance Per Watt

Cloudflare has millions of free customers. Not only is it something we’re incredibly proud of in the context of helping to build a better Internet — but it’s something that has made the Cloudflare service measurably better. One of the ways we’ve benefited is that it’s created a very strong imperative for Cloudflare to maintain a network that is as efficient as possible. There’s simply no other way to serve so many free customers.

In the spirit of this, we are very excited about the latest step in our energy-efficiency journey: turning to Arm for our server CPUs. It has been a long journey getting here — we started testing our first Arm CPUs all the way back in November 2017. It’s only recently, however, that the quantum of energy efficiency improvement from Arm has become clear. Our first Arm CPU was deployed in production earlier this month — July 2021.

Our most recently deployed generation of edge servers, Gen X, used AMD Rome CPUs. Compared with that, the newest Arm based CPUs process an incredible 57% more Internet requests per watt. While AMD has a sequel, Milan (and which Cloudflare will also be deploying), it doesn’t achieve the same degree of energy efficiency that the Arm processor does — managing only 39% more requests per watt than Rome CPUs in our existing fleet. As Arm based CPUs become more widely deployed, and our software is further optimized to take advantage of the Arm architecture, we expect further improvements in the energy efficiency of Arm servers.

Using Arm, Cloudflare can now securely process over ten times as many Internet requests for every watt of power consumed, than we did for servers designed in 2013.

(In the graphic below, for 2021, the perforated data point refers to x86 CPUs, whereas the bold data point refers to Arm CPUs)

Designing Edge Servers with Arm CPUs to Deliver 57% More Performance Per Watt

As Arm server CPUs demonstrate their performance and become more widely deployed, we hope this will inspire x86 CPUs manufacturers (such as Intel and AMD) to urgently take energy efficiency more seriously. This is especially important since, worldwide, x86 CPUs continue to represent the vast majority of global data center energy consumption.

Together, we can reduce the carbon impact of Internet use. The environment depends on it.

Cloudflare: 100% Renewable & Zeroing Out Emissions Back to Day 1

Post Syndicated from Patrick Day original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-committed-to-building-a-greener-internet/

Cloudflare: 100% Renewable & Zeroing Out Emissions Back to Day 1

Cloudflare: 100% Renewable & Zeroing Out Emissions Back to Day 1

As we announced this week, Cloudflare is helping to create a clean slate for the Internet. Our goal is simple: help build a better, greener Internet with no carbon emissions that is powered by renewable energy.

To help us get there, Cloudflare is making two announcements. The first is that we’re committed to powering our network with 100% renewable energy. This builds on work we started back in 2018, and we think is clearly the right thing to do. We also believe it will ultimately lead to more efficient, more sustainable, and potentially cheaper products for our customers.

The second is that by 2025 Cloudflare aims to remove all greenhouse gases emitted as the result of powering our network since our launch in 2010. As we continue to improve the way we track and mitigate our carbon footprint, we want to help the Internet begin with a fresh start.

Finally, as part of our effort to track and mitigate our emissions, we’re also releasing our first annual carbon emissions inventory report. The report will provide detail on exactly how we calculate our carbon emissions as well as our renewable energy purchases. Transparency is one of Cloudflare’s core values. It’s how we work to build trust with our customers in everything we do, and that includes our sustainability efforts.

Purchasing Renewable Energy

Understanding Cloudflare’s commitment to power its network with 100% renewable energy requires some additional background on renewable energy markets, as well as international emissions accounting standards.

Companies that commit to powering their operations with 100% renewable energy are required to match their total energy used with electricity produced from renewable sources. The international standards that govern these types of commitments such as the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol and ISO 14064, are the same ones used by governments for quantifying their carbon emissions for global climate treaties like the Paris Climate Agreement. There are also additional industry best practices like RE100, which are voluntary guidelines established by companies working to support renewable energy development and eliminate carbon emissions.

Actually purchasing renewable energy consistent with those requirements can be done in several ways — through self-generation, like rooftop solar panels or wind turbines; through contracts with wind or solar farms via Power Purchase Agreements (PPA’s) or unbundled Renewable Energy Credits (RECs), or in some cases purchased through local utility companies like CleanPowerSF in San Francisco, CA.

The goal of providing so many options to purchase renewable energy is to leverage as much investment as possible in new renewable sources. As our colleague Jess Bailey described after our first renewable energy purchase in 2018, because of the way electricity flows through electrical grids, it’s impossible for the individual consumer to know whether they are using electricity from conventional or renewable sources. However, in order to allow customers of all sizes to invest in renewable energy generally, these standards and accounting systems allow individuals or organizations to track their investments and enjoy the benefits of supporting renewable energy, even if the actual power comes from the standard electrical grid.

According to IEA, in 2020 alone, global renewable energy capacity increased 45 percent, which was the largest annual increase since 1997. In addition, close to 50 percent of corporate renewable energy investment over the last five years has been by Internet Communications Technology (ICT) companies alone.

Cloudflare’s Renewable Energy

Cloudflare’s new commitment to power its network with renewable energy means that we will continue to match 100 percent of our global energy usage by purchasing energy from renewable sources. Although Cloudflare made its first renewable energy purchase in 2018, and matched its total global operations in both 2019 and 2020, we thought it was important to make a public, forward-looking commitment so that all of our stakeholders, including customers, investors, employees, and suppliers have confidence that we will continue to build our network on renewable energy moving forward.

To determine how much renewable energy to buy, we separate our total electrical usage into two types: network and facilities. For our network, we pull data from all of our servers and networking equipment located all over the world twice a year. For our facilities (or offices), per the GHG Protocol, we record our actual energy usage wherever we have access to utility bills. For offices located in larger buildings with multiple tenants, we use energy usage intensity (EUI) estimates calculated by the U.S. Energy Information Agency.

We also purchase renewable energy in two ways. The vast majority of our purchases are RECs, which we purchase through our partner 3Degrees to help make sure we are aligned with relevant standards like the GHG Protocol. In 2020, to match the usage of our network, Cloudflare purchased RECs, I-RECs, REGOs, and other energy attribute certificates from the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, Bulgaria, South Africa, and Turkey among others. Although Cloudflare has employed a regional purchasing strategy in the past, we also expect to be fully aligned with all RE100 criteria, including its market boundary criteria, by the end of 2021.

Removing our historic emissions

Cloudflare’s goal is to remove or offset all of our historical emissions resulting from powering our network by 2025. To meet that target, Cloudflare must first determine exactly how much carbon was emitted as the result of operating our network from 2010 to 2019, and then invest in carbon offsets or removals to match those emissions.

Determining carbon emissions from purchased electricity is a relatively straightforward calculation. In fact, it’s basically just a unit conversion:

Energy (KWH) x Emissions Factor (gC02e/KWH) = Carbon emissions (gC02e)

The key to accurate results is the emissions factors. Emissions factors are essentially measurements of the amount of GHGs emitted from a specific power supplier (e.g. power plant X in San Francisco) per unit of energy created. For our purposes, GHGs are those defined in the 1992 Kyoto Protocol (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulphur hexafluoride). To help ease reporting, the six GHGs are often expressed as a single unit “carbon-dioxide equivalent” or “CO2e”, based on each gas’ Global Warming Potential (GWP). Emission factors from individual power sources are often combined and averaged to create grid average emissions factors for cities, regions, or countries. Per the GHG Protocol, Cloudflare uses emissions factors from the U.S. EPA, U.K. DEFRA, and IEA.

For our annual inventory report, which we are also releasing today, Cloudflare calculates carbon emissions scores for every single data center in our network. Cloudflare multiplies the actual energy used by the equipment by the applicable grid average emissions factors in each of the more than 100 countries where we have equipment.

For our historical calculations, we have data on our actual carbon emissions dating back to 2018, which was our first renewable energy purchase. Prior to 2018, we are combing through all of our purchasing, shipping, energy usage, and colocation agreements to reconstruct how much energy we consumed and when. It’s actually a pretty cool exercise to go back and watch our network grow. Although we do not have a final calculation to share yet, rest assured we will keep everyone posted, particularly as we get to the fun part of starting to work with organizations and companies working on carbon removal efforts.

Where we are going next

Although we’re proud of the steps we’re taking as a company with renewable energy and carbon emissions, we’re just getting started.

Cloudflare is also exploring new products and ideas that can help leverage the power of one of the world’s largest networks to drive better climate outcomes for our customers and for the Internet. To see a really cool example, check out our colleagues blog post from earlier today, on Green Compute on Cloudflare Workers, which is helping Cloudflare’s intelligent edge route some additional workloads to renewable energy facilities, or our Carbon Impact Reports, which are helping our customers optimize their carbon footprint.

Green Hosting with Cloudflare Pages

Post Syndicated from Nevi Shah original https://blog.cloudflare.com/green-hosting-with-cloudflare-pages/

Green Hosting with Cloudflare Pages

At Cloudflare, we are continuing to expand our sustainability initiatives to build a greener Internet in more than one way. We are seeing a shift in attitudes towards eco-consciousness and have noticed that with all things considered equal, if an option to reduce environmental impact is available, that’s the one widely preferred by our customers. With Pages now Generally Available, we believe we have the power to help our customers reach their sustainability goals. That is why we are excited to partner with the Green Web Foundation as we commit to making sure our Pages infrastructure is powered by 100% renewable energy.

The Green Web Foundation

As part of Cloudflare’s Impact Week, Cloudflare is proud to announce its collaboration with the Green Web Foundation (GWF), a not-for-profit organization with the mission of creating an Internet that one day will run on entirely renewable energy. GWF maintains an extensive and globally categorized Green Hosting Directory with over 320 certified hosts in 26 countries! In addition to this directory, the GWF also develops free online tools, APIs and open datasets readily available for companies looking to contribute to its mission.

Green Hosting with Cloudflare Pages

What does it mean to be a Green Web Foundation partner?

All websites certified as operating on 100 percent renewable energy by GWF must provide evidence of their energy usage and renewable energy purchases. Cloudflare Pages have already taken care of that step for you, including by sharing our public Carbon Emissions Inventory report. As a result, all Cloudflare Pages are automatically listed on GWF’s  public global directory as official green hosts.

After these claims were approved by the team at GWF, what do I have to do to get certified?

If you’re hosting your site on Cloudflare Pages, absolutely nothing.

All existing and new sites created on Pages are automatically certified as “green” too! But don’t just take our word for it. With our partnership with GWF and as a Pages user, you can enter your own pages.dev or custom domain into the Green Web Check to verify your site’s green hosting status. Once the domain is shown as verified, you can display the Green Web Foundation badge on your webpage to showcase your contributions to a more sustainable Internet as a green-hosted site. You can obtain this badge by one of two ways:

  1. Saving the badge image directly.
  2. Adding the provided snippet of HTML to your existing code.
Green Hosting with Cloudflare Pages

Helping to Build a Greener Internet

Cloudflare is committed to helping our customers achieve their sustainability goals through the use of our products. In addition to our initiative with the Green Web Foundation for this year’s Impact Week, we are thrilled to announce the other ways we are building a greener Internet, such as our Carbon Impact Report and Green Compute on Cloudflare Workers.

We can all play a small part in reducing our carbon footprint. Start today by setting up your site with Cloudflare Pages!

“Cloudflare’s recent climate disclosures and commitments are encouraging, especially given how much traffic flows through their network. Every provider should be at least this transparent when it comes to accounting for the environmental impact of their services. We see a growing number of users relying on CDNs to host their sites, and they are often confused when their sites no longer show as green, because they’re not using a green CDN. It’s good to see another more sustainable option available to users, and one that is independently verified.” – Chris Adams, Co-director of The Green Web Foundation

Understand and reduce your carbon impact with Cloudflare

Post Syndicated from Natasha Wissmann original https://blog.cloudflare.com/understand-and-reduce-your-carbon-impact-with-cloudflare/

Understand and reduce your carbon impact with Cloudflare

Understand and reduce your carbon impact with Cloudflare

Today, as part of Cloudflare’s Impact Week, we’re excited to announce a new tool to help you understand the environmental impact of operating your websites, applications, and networks. Your Carbon Impact Report, available today for all Cloudflare accounts, will outline the carbon savings of operating your Internet properties on Cloudflare’s network.

Everyone has a role to play in reducing carbon impact and reversing climate change. We shared today how we’re approaching this, by committing to power our network with 100% renewable energy. But we’ve also heard from customers that want more visibility into the impact of the tools they use (also referred to as “Scope 3” emissions) — and we want to help!

The impact of running an Internet property

We’ve previously blogged about how Internet infrastructure affects the environment. At a high level, powering hardware (like servers) uses energy. Depending on its source, producing this energy may involve emitting carbon into the atmosphere, which contributes to climate change.

When you use Cloudflare, we use energy to power hardware to deliver content for you. But how does that energy we use compare to the energy it would take to deliver content without Cloudflare? As of today, you can go to the Cloudflare dashboard to see the (approximate) carbon savings from your usage of Cloudflare services versus Internet averages for your usage volume.

Understand and reduce your carbon impact with Cloudflare

Calculating the carbon savings of your Cloudflare use

Most of the energy that Cloudflare uses comes from powering the servers at our edge to serve your content. We’ve outlined how we quantify the carbon impact of this energy in our emissions report. To determine the percentage of this impact derived from your Cloudflare usage specifically, we’ve used the following method:

When you use Cloudflare, data from requests destined to your Internet property goes through our edge. Data transfer for your Internet properties roughly represents a fraction of the energy consumed at Cloudflare’s edge. If we sum up the data transfer for your Internet properties and multiply that number by the energy it takes to power each request (derived from our emissions report and overall usage data), we can approximate the total carbon impact of powering your Internet properties with Cloudflare.

We already knew that delivering content takes some energy and therefore has some carbon impact. So how much energy does Cloudflare actually save you? To determine what your usage would look like without Cloudflare, we’ve used the following method:

Using public information on average data center energy usage and the International Energy Agency’s global average emissions for energy usage, we can calculate the carbon cost of data transfer through average (non-Cloudflare) networks. We can then compare these numbers to arrive at your carbon savings from using Cloudflare.

With our new Carbon Impact Report, available for all plans/users, we’ve given you this value for your account. It represents the carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) that you’ve saved as a result of using Cloudflare to serve requests to your Internet properties in 2020.

This raw number is great, but it isn’t the easiest to understand. What does a gram of carbon dioxide equivalent actually mean in practice? It’s not a unit of measurement most of us are used to seeing in our day-to-day lives. To make this number a little easier to digest, we’ve also provided a comparison to light bulbs.

Standard light bulbs are 60 watts, so we know that turning on a light bulb for an hour uses 0.06 kilowatt-hours of energy. According to the EPA, that’s about 42 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent. That means that if your carbon dioxide equivalent saving is 126 grams, that’s approximately the same impact as turning off a light bulb for three hours.

How does using Cloudflare impact the environment?

As explained in more detail here, Cloudflare purchases Renewable Energy Credits to account for the energy used by our network. This means that your use of Cloudflare’s services is powered by renewable energy.

Additionally, using Cloudflare helps you reduce your overall carbon footprint. Using Cloudflare’s cloud security and performance services such as WAF, Network Firewall, and DDoS mitigation allow you to decommission specialized hardware and transfer those functions to software running efficiently at our edge. This reduces your carbon footprint by significantly decreasing the energy used to operate your network stack, and improves your security, performance, and reliability along the way.

Optimizing your website also reduces your carbon footprint by requiring less energy for your end users to load a page. Using Cloudflare’s Image Resizing for visual content on your site to properly resize images reduces the energy it takes each of your end users to load a page, thus reducing downstream carbon emissions.

Lastly, since Cloudflare is a certified green host, any content you host on Pages or Workers KV is hosted green and certified powered by renewable energy.

What’s next

This dashboard is just a first step in giving our customers transparent information on their carbon use, savings, and ideas for improvement with Cloudflare. Right now, you can view data on your carbon savings from 2020 (aligned with our 2020 emissions report). As we continue to iterate on how we measure carbon impact, we’re working toward providing dynamic information on carbon savings at a quarterly or even monthly granularity.

Have other ideas on what we can provide to help you understand and reduce the carbon impact of your Internet properties? Please reach out to us in the comments on this post or on social media!

We hope that this data helps you with your sustainability goals, and we’re excited to keep providing you with transparent information for 2021 and beyond.