Cloud Provider Sustainability, Current Status and Future Directions

Cloud providers are large, growing rapidly, and leading sustainable development of datacenters, although their total capacity is still a small proportion of the global datacenter footprint. In the next few years, all the major cloud vendors expect to reach 100% green energy in all their regions via power purchase agreements, and the local power grids worldwide are rapidly transitioning to green energy, so energy usage (scope 2) will become less material over time. Supply chain carbon footprint (scope 3) is already starting to dominate, as it’s dependent on low carbon buildings, manufacturing processes and delivery mechanisms that are on much longer decarbonization timescales. So far each of the major cloud providers has made different sustainability commitments, over different timescales, with different reporting methodologies and levels of detail. It's messy and confusing, and this talk will explain what is available now, public roadmap statements and commitments that have been made by AWS, Azure and GCP. Turning the problem around, what would a useful common standard look like, and what would developers and tools vendors be able to do with it?  


Speaker

Adrian Cockcroft

Former VP Amazon Sustainability Architecture @Amazon

Adrian Cockcroft has had a long career working at the leading edge of technology. He’s always been fascinated by what comes next, and he writes and speaks extensively on a range of subjects. He joined Amazon as their VP of Cloud Architecture Strategy in 2016, recruited and leads their open source community engagement team. He was previously a Technology Fellow at Battery Ventures. There he advised the firm and its portfolio companies about technology issues and also assists with deal sourcing and due diligence. Before joining Battery, Adrian helped lead Netflix’s migration to a large scale, highly available public-cloud architecture and the open sourcing of the cloud-native NetflixOSS platform. Prior to that at Netflix he managed a team working on personalization algorithms and service-oriented refactoring. Adrian was a founding member of eBay Research Labs, developing advanced mobile applications and even building his own homebrew phone, years before iPhone and Android launched. As a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems he wrote the best-selling “Sun Performance and Tuning” book and was chief architect for High Performance Technical Computing. He graduated from The City University, London with a Bsc in Applied Physics and Electronics, and was named one of the top leaders in Cloud Computing in 2011 and 2012 by SearchCloudComputing magazine.
 

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Date

Wednesday Mar 29 / 01:40PM BST ( 50 minutes )

Location

Windsor (5th Fl.)

Topics

cloud sustainability

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