Cloud Carbon Dashboards & APIs

Info

To have a more sustainable cloud, more transparency is required. The big cloud providers all provide carbon dashboards so the customers are able to see their own carbon emissions.

But how good are they actually? What methodology is used? What to use in a multi-cloud environment?

Related to: Estimate carbon emissions of cloud applications

Measuring for Reporting vs. Measuring for Action

Measuring for reporting is different than measuring for action!
Currently, the cloud providers only provide data for reporting!

Overview

Provider GHG Scopes Covered Interface Latency Granularity Location vs market based accounting
AWS 1,2 Dashboard Monthly
(with 3 month delay)
Coarse - EC2 and S3 are listed individually, all other services grouped as one figure.
Location breakdown by continent, not per region
Rounds down figures to the nearest 0.1 tCO2e
Market-based
Azure 1,2,3 Power BI Monthly Fine grained Market-based
GCP 1,2,3 Dashboard Monthly Fine grained Location-based

Source: https://www.techcarbonstandard.org/information/cloud#quantifying-the-emissions-of-cloud-services

Cloud Carbon Dashboards & APIs-20240920064014436.webp

Source: LinkedIn, Green IO Conference London 2024, Presentation by Mark Butcher

Other overview articles:

AWS: Customer Carbon Footprint Tool

Purpose: Dashboard for the carbon emissions of your AWS usage
Website: https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/aws-customer-carbon-footprint-tool/
Costs? free of charge
Update cycle? 3 months ("New data is available monthly, with a delay of three months")
Open source? βœ–

GHG scopes: only 1 & 2

What data is included?

Azure: Emissions Impact Dashboard for Azure

Purpose: Dashboard for the carbon emissions of your Azure and Microsoft 365 usage
Website: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sustainability/emissions-impact-dashboard
Costs? ~10 € per user
Update cycle? 14 days after the end of a month
Open source? βœ–

GHG scopes: 1, 2 & 3

What data is included?

Sources:

How to use?
β†’Connect to the Emissions Impact Dashboard for Azure

Azure: Cloud for Sustainability API

Purpose: Provides APIs to access emissions data related to your Azure and Microsoft 365 usage
Website: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/industry/sustainability/api-overview
Costs? currently (as of 2024-01-26) in preview
Update cycle? 14 days after the end of a month
Open source? βœ–

GHG scopes: 1, 2 & 3

What data is included?
See above, same cloud emissions tracking is used as for the Emissions Impact Dashboard for Azure.

How to use it?

Google: Carbon Footprint

Purpose: Dashboard for the carbon emissions of your Google Cloud usage
Website: https://cloud.google.com/carbon-footprint
Costs? free of charge
Update cycle? ~3 weeks
Open source? βœ–

GHG scopes: 1, 2 & 3

What data is included?

Google Carbon Footprint uses real energy usage data, location-based carbon emissions from electricity, and allocates them across customers and products, augmenting with proportional allocations of emissions from non-electricity sources. The machine energy usage is allocated to internal services by evaluating dynamic power (energy used during workload) and idle power separately. The hourly dynamic power is assigned to internal services based on relative CPU usage, while idle power is allocated based on resource allocation. Overhead energy consumption, such as power systems, cooling and lighting, is also included. Energy usage for shared infrastructure services is reallocated based on relative usage or internal cost of service where data is insufficient.

Source: @Google.2024.CarbonFootprintReporting

Cloud Carbon Footprint

Purpose: Provide the estimated carbon footprint of your cloud usage, supporting AWS, Azure, GCP
Website: https://www.cloudcarbonfootprint.org/
Costs? free of charge
Update cycle? ❔
Open source? βœ”

GHG scopes: 1, 2 & 3 (partly)

What data is included? (β†’methodology)