Sustainability and climate commitments are at the forefront of many businesses today. These same committments are accelerating the move to sustainable engineering. In this webinar, hear Dr. Tim Chou, Stanford Lecturer and former Oracle-on-Demand President, and Asim Razzaq, CEO and Founder of Yotascale discuss how every engineer can make an impact on their carbon footprint.
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Webinar Transcript
Charlene O’Hanlon
Right. Hi, good afternoon, good morning, or good evening depending upon where you are in the world and welcome to today’s devops.com webinar. I’m Charlene O’Hanlon, moderator for today’s event, and I welcome you. As always, we have a great event on tap. I’m very, very excited about this conversation we’re going to be having. But before we get started, we do have a few housekeeping items we need to go over.
First of all, today’s event is being recorded, so if you miss any or all of the event, you will have the opportunity to access it later. Following today’s webinar, we will be sending out an email that contains a link to access the webinar on demand. We are also taking questions from the audience, so if at any time during today’s presentation you have a question for either speaker, please don’t wait. Don’t hesitate. Just use the question and answer tab on your interface and submit your question, and we will try to get to as many as we can near the end of today’s webinar. We also have a very interactive public chat feature, so I encourage you, if you have a comment that you want to send over to us, please use that interface. We will take a look at all of the chats that come in and will check you back as well.
Finally, at the end of today’s webinar, we are doing a drawing for 4 $25 Amazon gift cards, so please stick around. Hopefully, you’ll be one of our four lucky winners. All right, with that, let’s go ahead and kick off today’s webinar, which is “How Green is Your Cloud and Eliminating Cloud Waste to Build Sustainable Computing.” Our speakers today are Asim Razzaq, who is the founder and CEO of Yotascale, and Timothy Chou, who is a board member and lecturer at Stanford Cloud Computing. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me today. I do appreciate your being here.
Asim Razzaq
Thank you, Charlene.
Charlene O’Hanlon
Great. Asim, I know that you were going to be kicking off the conversation. I’m going to take myself off camera and put myself on mute. We do have a couple of polling questions, so I want to make sure that the audience knows about that. I’ll come off mute when we get to the polling questions, but until then, I’ll be on the backside.
Asim Razzaq
Thank you, Charlene, and thank you everybody for joining. Just a warning that this is going to be a conversational webinar, so we are not going to bore you with a bunch of slides. I always love talking to Tim and getting his perspective. We’ll get to intros here shortly, but this is a topic that’s near and dear to my heart, having built cloud infrastructure for a number of years. One of the key things that I can offer you at the outset is that if you have anything to do with building digital infrastructure, building applications on-premises, in the data center, or in the public cloud, you have an extremely important role to play with respect to the health of the planet. A lot of people don’t realize that. I was one of those people not too long ago. There’s a lot that can be done as digital infrastructure starts becoming the smokestack of the modern era.
Lots to cover here in terms of how you can make this a greener planet with respect to your day-to-day job. Just by way of introduction, my name is Asim Razzaq. I’m the co-founder and CEO of Yotascale. The vision of our company is to make cloud computing economically and environmentally viable for every organization in the world. Of course, what that means is that we help reduce your spend by making your workloads efficient in the public cloud. As a side effect of that, we also believe that can reduce your carbon footprint, which is again a key topic for our discussion. Prior to Yotascale, I was Senior Director of Engineering and Head of Platform Engineering at PayPal and eBay, where my teams were responsible for running all core infrastructure, logins, payments, and big data. When it was eBay, PayPal, and Skype, I was brought in to help scale the third wave of growth for PayPal, which is the developer platform. In the process, as you can imagine, there’s a lot of infrastructure that had to be built. I was lucky enough to build the PayPal private cloud, and I’ve had sort of my love relationship with public cloud computing, which is all those trade-offs around cost versus performance and eliminating wastage. With that, I’ll pass it on to Tim to introduce himself.
Timothy Chou
Thanks, Asim. I’ll just do a little bit of background. I’ve been involved in this move to the cloud since late 1999. I actually served as the first President of Oracle’s cloud computing business. I actually started the first class on cloud computing at Stanford now about 15 years ago. I also serve as the chairman of The Alchemist Accelerator, an accelerator focused on enterprise software companies. That’s where I met Asim, and I don’t know, it’s been five years or more than that. I always say I’m a big fan of his, a big fan of the work that Yotascale has been doing, and have been pleased to continue a level of involvement with them.
I thought I’d start out the conversation with something I know, Asim. You were just at the Green Data Summit that was hosted by Al Gore’s Generations Investment Fund. For those of you who don’t know about that, Generations is actually a very early investment fund that focused on this whole thing called ESG. Asim, I have a bunch of questions to throw at you about your being there. Like, who, what, why? Who else was on the panel? Why did they invite you? And what the heck does ESG mean?
Asim Razzaq
Great questions, Tim. I was privileged to be a part of this pretty exclusive panel discussion. They had a number of thought leaders from across many different sectors. As an example, we had Sanjay Podder, who is Managing Director for Sustainability Innovation at Accenture, because that topic is pretty front and center for a lot of consulting companies this day and age. We had Professor Eric Masanet, who is Chair of Sustainability at UC Santa Barbara. In addition to that, we had thought leaders from every part of the tech stack. They were innovators looking at more efficient hardware, companies like Yotascale that are looking at the software layer, and folks who were focused on moving workloads from the data center to the public cloud. One key stat is that in general, public cloud computing tends to be more green than the data center part of it. Now, of course, there can be a lot more wastage in the public cloud as a result of all the factors that we might talk about here shortly.
As you know, ESG, as you mentioned, is an increasingly important topic that is becoming a point of discussion in a lot of boardrooms and in the investor community. What it stands for is environmental, social, and corporate governance criteria. The environmental part is really what we’re focused on today: how do you have a lesser carbon footprint across the board, not just in your digital infrastructure but in the buildings you have? Every company has a responsibility towards that. The social part of it is around employee happiness, human rights, fair wage, and the governance part is corporate structure but also cuts across the environmental and social parts. It’s about how you structure the governance of the company to align the environmental and social pieces well together. There are a lot of funds out there gauging companies on how well they are doing on ESG. There’s a lot more investment, and even in the public markets, we’re starting to see that if you are doing better on ESG, your stock is going to do better as a result. So that’s what ESG stands for. I’d be very curious, with respect to our audience, to see how many people have heard of ESG and if their companies have that as a top-of-mind initiative or not. Charlene, if you would be kind enough to launch that poll, I would love to see that.
Charlene O’Hanlon
Yes, so the poll is now open to the audience. The question is, does your company have an environmental, social, and governance initiative? The answer options are yes, no, or I don’t know. You can go ahead and make your choice. I’ll leave the polling question open for just a little bit so the audience can go ahead and make their selection. Asim, go ahead and continue with your conversation, and then we’ll circle back and take a look at the poll results once you get a chance.
Asim Razzaq
Absolutely. So, Tim, back to your question on some of the key insights we discussed. It started with awareness. Digital infrastructure is increasingly becoming a key part of the new economy. Having awareness around the fact that this is something we need to pay attention to for a better planet is crucial. Just to link it personally, I have three kids, three boys, and the work I do helps build and optimize digital infrastructure. I can at least take that message back to them and say, “Here is something I’m doing in my humble capacity to help make the planet a better place.” There was a lot of recognition of that, and the promise everyone made around the table was to also evangelize that in their larger community and ecosystem. That’s our humble effort here as well, to get other folks in this ecosystem to take these conversations back to their companies and make sure they’re paying attention to making the planet greener.
I’ll pause there and see if you have anything additional to ask or add.
Timothy Chou
Yeah, just to maybe help the audience understand how this is impacting at the board level. I sit on a couple of public company boards. I just got back from a meeting actually just last week. And I’ll tell you, it’s actually in the boardroom. We were discussing in one of the committees an ESG initiative that is company-wide. And I think what maybe the listeners can think about is, it’s an area that a year or two years ago, a lot of European investors and European companies were interested in. I think both the renewed interest in carbon footprint diversity, etcetera, has really accelerated it into the US companies and the US investment community. So ESG today, there are companies that are ranking, interpreting, and giving people a grade on where they are with ESG. I just want to make the comment that at the public board level and the investor level, it’s really becoming not just kind of a back order conversation. Increasing awareness, you know, all of you out there, go on and become a student of what ESG means, because it’s not only affecting our boardrooms but also the planet.
Asim Razzaq
I’ll share a few resources towards the end of the webinar here where people can go learn more about this. A couple of other things I would share from the summit are a statement from a CIO of a pretty large company about their digital infrastructure, more specifically cloud computing. They said, “I know that I’m wasting half of my capacity. I just don’t know which half.” Many people struggle with gaining an understanding of the complexity of infrastructure, where it’s going, and how it’s getting wasted. In 2020, there was about $18 billion in wasted spend in public cloud computing alone. There’s an economic aspect to this, but what’s dear to my heart and many others’ is the impact on our planet from a carbon footprint point of view. Charlene, if you have the results of the poll, it would be good to review them here shortly before we move on.
Charlene O’Hanlon
Sure, sure. Just a reminder, the question was, does your company have an ESG initiative? 47% of attendees said yes, they have one in place, 29% said they don’t know, and 24% said no, they do not. Hopefully, that sets the stage for you.
Asim Razzaq
Great. Well, I guess it starts there. Go ahead Tim.
Timothy Chou
Alright. Yeah, that’s impressive. Hey, Asim, since you know, that’s actually a larger number than I would have guessed. Let’s dive in here. The “E” in ESG is about the environment. Many of us might think about that as, “Oh, you’re talking about Exxon or a company with smokestacks, manufacturing companies needing to worry about the E in ESG.” So what does cloud computing have to do with this? Why should we care about the E in ESG?
Asim Razzaq
We care about this because it’s a bit behind the scenes now. There’s a stat that a server has the same carbon footprint as an employee. In a given year, if a server was running and you had an employee at a company, they would have a similar carbon footprint.
It used to be the case a few years ago, let’s say 10-15 years ago, that the ratio, even for a highly tech-savvy company, would be 1:1. Your digital infrastructure is producing a similar carbon footprint as your employees. Today, for some companies, that ratio is 100 servers to a single employee; in some cases, it could be 1000:1. We need to start thinking about not just the industrial complex but also the hidden cost of the digital infrastructure—the server-to-employee ratio as a proxy metric. Understanding how much of that is from renewable energy is also crucial because different companies are at different stages in ensuring how much of their capacity is renewable.
Timothy Chou
Absolutely. Absolutely. One interesting thing about that number—1:1, 10:1, 100:1—is that it’s almost an interesting metric of how digitally transformed your business is. I think you have a polling question, don’t you?
Asim Razzaq
Yes, I think it would be good to see if the folks on the call know for their own company how many servers per employee their company has because that is an important metric to keep in mind. Charlene?
Charlene O’Hanlon
Yes, the polling question is already out there. The question is, how many servers or instances do you have per employee? You can choose from 1, 10, 100, or I don’t know. Go ahead and make your choice. I’ll leave this open so you guys can continue your conversation, and then we’ll circle back and take a look at the poll results.
Asim Razzaq
Thank you, Charlene. We’ll come back to this. Tim, I know you and I were talking about this earlier. You felt very strongly that this server-to-employee metric can be very key in gauging the effectiveness of how green the digital strategy is. If you want to elaborate on that a little more, that would be very helpful.
Timothy Chou
Yeah, I think for the audience interested in this problem, if you want to calculate your corporate computing carbon footprint—which many people do for both on-premises and cloud—the first factor is the number of servers per employee. This can show order-of-magnitude differences between traditional and modern digital corporations. Second, reach into the data center where those servers are and look at the PUE (power utilization efficiency), which measures how much energy is used by the computers versus air conditioning, etc. There can be a three-to-one difference between old and modern data centers. Third, consider where the power is coming from—hydro dam or coal-fired plant. There can be a four-to-one difference in carbon footprint based on power sources. Combining these factors helps calculate your digital infrastructure’s carbon footprint.
Asim Razzaq
Relating this to the audience—if I’m an application developer, a dev ops engineer, or running platform engineering—what are some things I can do to start getting my arms around this? I might not have all the data and stats on where the power is coming from. Is the employee-to-server ratio a good starting point?
Timothy Chou
I think it is. It’s probably the one that’ll give a quick reading on how much you should care about this problem. If you’re at 10:1, you should start caring a lot. If you’re under 1:1, maybe you can kick the can down the road. We’re all in the middle of digital transformation, using computing more to drive our businesses. This ratio is only increasing. So, to your point, how can Yotascale help me with this problem if I’m at 25:1? How can you help me figure this out?
Asim Razzaq
For us, what we see with our customer base is this constant challenge of over-provisioning and wasted capacity. The promise of cloud computing—flexibility and agility—is great, but it’s easy to just buy capacity and forget about it. Some companies might care more about the economics than others, but even if you don’t care about all the economics, the health of the planet is important. At Yotascale, we see spiky loads where companies spin up a bunch of servers and forget to shut them down. This is where software can help by providing guardrails, indicating idle servers to shut down, and right-sizing capacity to reduce wastage.
Understanding who is using what capacity in the context of your business is crucial. Cost can be a proxy for capacity utilization. This helps have a dialogue within the company about where the capacity is going. Once aware of this data, teams can self-regulate. Engineering teams do care about not wasting capacity, economics, and the carbon footprint. When they see they reserved a lot of capacity but only use a small portion, they will take action. Sustainability leads to more profits, making these trade-offs easier for people to make.
Charlene, what are the results from our last poll?
Charlene O’Hanlon
Absolutely. The polling question was, how many servers or instances do you have per employee? More than half, 60%, said they don’t know. Then, 29% said one, and 12% said 100. So there was no in-between—either one or 100. There you go. I think those results are kind of interesting.
Asim Razzaq
There is a huge call to action for the 60% of the audience to go and help figure that out. If you’re not part of the cloud ops team or the cloud engineering team, you can easily ask that question and make that determination. Tim, any comment on that?
Timothy Chou
Just to comment, when I was doing this with companies, I told them not to worry about being exact. Just get rough numbers of employees and servers. As we heard, the differences can be from 1:1 to 100:1. This opens your eyes, so you don’t need an exact computation to get an idea of where your company sits.
Asim Razzaq
To put it in context, one more stat is that in the next three years, we’re gearing up to produce more data than ever in human history. Think about it: that data won’t just be stored; there will be machine learning models, analytics, and a huge amount of compute involved. The time is now. This is a problem of the now. The steps we take now will bear fruit down the road.
I want to share a few resources. You’ll also receive a handout. The first is a Medium article on the Green Data Summit summary. This will give you all the key points that were discussed and why this is such an important and critical point of discussion. The second one is a nice primer from ThoughtWorks on the importance of the green cloud and what it means.
The final one is for all the nerds like me out there. It’s an open-source initiative. This is open-source software that you can tweak and deploy to figure out the carbon footprint of your company’s environment. You could potentially contribute back to the open-source project in terms of determining your carbon footprint.
Tim, this has been a great discussion. I wanted to see if there are any questions that came in from our chat.
Charlene O’Hanlon
We did. We did have one question that came in from Christopher. You may have actually just addressed it, but the question is, how do I quickly tell how dirty my cloud service provider’s power is? Is there a website I can find this information?
Asim Razzaq
Christopher, that’s a great question. We can follow up on this. If your cloud provider is AWS, Google, or Azure, many of them actually now publish this information. I want to give kudos to GCP because they have taken the lead in sharing the percentage of carbon-free energy for each of their regions and zones. You will start seeing more of this from other cloud providers. If you mean someone on the data center side, that might be a bit more complicated. Tim, do you have any thoughts on this for on-prem and data center environments?
Timothy Chou
Yes, we could share. There are resources to look at the carbon intensity of different grid locations in the US. You can actually see how dirty the power is in that region. We could share those resources.
Asim Razzaq
We can follow up on that. But definitely for public cloud providers, there’s a lot of information available.
Charlene O’Hanlon
Excellent. We did get another question. Jono is asking, software vendors are all peddling big data solutions. Is the value of these solutions worth the environmental impact of collecting, transmitting, and storing that data?
Asim Razzaq
Tim, do you have a thought on that?
Timothy Chou
Well, that is an interesting value question. It’s worth asking if the value justifies the environmental impact. Clearly, we could come up with examples where the answer is no, depending on the carbon footprint. I don’t know if anybody ever asked this question, but it’s worth asking. If we’re not measuring and managing this stuff, we can’t answer the value question. It’s an encouragement to everyone here to ask these questions, as there are answers to them.
Asim Razzaq
Have that conversation. If you’re talking to one of these vendors, make it a primary variable in your conversation. Ask how they think about efficiency and lifecycle management. If data isn’t needed, how can it be stored in an extremely low carbon-emission way? It’s the responsibility of both the customer and the vendor to come together. Just like anything, if the market doesn’t drive this, it won’t become a primary variable for many companies.
Charlene O’Hanlon
Alright, great. Another question from John. He asks, are there CSP rankings on their ESG commitment?
Asim Razzaq
I assume CSP means cloud service provider. That’s a good question. At least for the top three to five, it would be good to know what commitments they have made publicly. We can also follow up on this one.
Charlene O’Hanlon
Alright, great. Here’s another question. How do we get started with reducing our digital cloud waste? I’m sure this is a question you get a lot.
Asim Razzaq
You can’t improve what you can’t measure, so start with understanding where the capacity is going and why. Yotascale is one of the products that can help with this. It starts with visibility. Once you have visibility, it will shed a lot of light even if you don’t have the exact footprint. The cost can be a proxy, and the number of servers per employee can be a proxy metric. Try to understand how many of these are being spun up and if it makes sense for the size of your company. Tim, anything to add?
Timothy Chou
No, I think you’ve said it. Cost is a proxy for carbon. If you don’t need to consume it, why consume it? It’s a responsibility conversation.
Charlene O’Hanlon
Alright. We have a question from Linda who asks, CDN service providers have multiple times more active servers than typical cloud providers. Is there a way to shut down CDN servers during off-peak hours?
Asim Razzaq
Just my perspective on it, having been in infrastructure, it’s a trade-off. Teams over-provision capacity because you get into a lot of trouble if your service is down and a little trouble if it costs a bit more. Tim, I’m not aware of any software out there for CDN orchestration. It’s a valid point because media companies and those with a lot of content rely on this backbone. Do you have any thoughts?
Timothy Chou
I have two comments. One, you could look at it as a differential pricing question. Why charge the same for peak and off-peak hours? Whether Akamai or Amazon CDN provides that, I don’t know. Two, you could ask your CDN provider about the carbon footprint. It’s a valid question, especially if CDN servers are consuming tons of power. If Disney Plus consumes 10 times the carbon that Netflix does, it could influence consumer choices. Asking these questions is crucial.
Charlene O’Hanlon
Absolutely. We are still taking more questions, so if you have one for Asim or Timothy, please use the question and answer tab. Those are all the questions we have for now, but I’ll leave it open for any last-minute questions. While we wait, I want to remind the audience that today’s event has been recorded. If you missed any part of the webinar, you can access it on-demand. We will be sending an email with a link to access the webinar on-demand. It will also be available on the devops.com website under the on-demand section. It looks like we haven’t received any more questions, so I think we’ve pretty much exhausted it.
I want to thank everyone who submitted questions. Some real stumpers there, so thank you very much. Also, thanks to Asim and Timothy for a great presentation. It’s always fascinating to talk about the ecological impacts of cloud services. It’s definitely something we should be talking about more. Thank you both for bringing up such an important topic. Thank you to the audience for joining me today. Good stuff all around. This is Charlene O’Hanlon signing off. Have a great day, everybody, and please stay safe.
Asim Razzaq
Thank you and take care.
Timothy Chou
Thanks.
