In the last decade, our society has become increasingly concerned about the state of our environment and much more conscious about the emissions we create. Recently, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched a tool that will help its customers track the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) released into the atmosphere by the cloud computing services they use.
This free (yes, free) tool is called the Customer Carbon Footprint Tool. It will help customers not only track the amount of CO2 their cloud computing devices are releasing but also understand carbon emissions as a whole. Additionally, it will allow them to see what their other computer and network services are generating as well.
The Customer Carbon Footprint Tool will collect the data from commercial AWS regions and calculate a monthly emissions report. Currently, AWS says there is a delay (of 3 months) because of “the underlying billing cycle of the electric utilities that supply us with power.”
To use the Customer Carbon Footprint Tool, go to the AWS “Billing Console” under the “Cost & Usage Reports” section on the menu. Once you locate it, you’ll find a summary of the emissions generated throughout the region that use EC2 and S3 storage services. The measurements you’ll be provided will be in metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MTCO2e).
The Customer Carbon Footprint Tool was developed because there is a rising trend amongst tech firms to boost and measure the effect that given services are having on the environment.
AWS is not alone in its development of this type of software. Salesforce and Google have both announced that their customers can become “net-zero,” in terms of carbon output, with Net Zero Cloud 2.0.
Likewise, Microsoft joined The Climate Pledge in 2020. The Climate Pledge is a group that Amazon co-founded with the hopes of becoming net-zero carbon by 2040. This is 10 years sooner than the Paris Agreement target.
Let’s face it, large-scale data centers, like those run by Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, are bound to consume large amounts of energy. That said, even they have the capability of being more efficient than data centers were traditionally. The International Data Corporation (IDC) suggests that between 2021 and 2024, just switching to cloud computing will eliminate nearly 629 million metric tons of CO2 emissions.
Through the use of the Customer Carbon Footprint Tool, AWS suggests that its customers have the ability to reduce their carbon footprint by nearly 88 percent compared to a standard enterprise data center. Moreover, AWS is also utilizing Rust (the programming language) as a way to reduce their own energy consumption because Rust is a more energy-efficient coding language.
In current trends, data centers are responsible for 1 percent of the world’s entire energy consumption. This consumption equates to nearly 200 terawatt hours each day. By switching to the coding languages of C and Rust, this consumption could be cut in half, according to AWS engineers.
The rest of the big tech companies are also in the process of reducing their carbon emissions. Google achieved carbon neutrality in 2007 and hopes their whole business will be carbon-free by 2030. Apple hopes to be carbon neutral (for the company and its supply chain) by 2030. Microsoft hopes that its whole supply chain will be carbon negative by 2030. IBM and Facebook are working toward net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2030.