Cloud Carbon Footprint

As climate change becomes a major concern, measuring and reducing the carbon footprint of our activities is essential. Cloud Carbon Footprint is an open-source library that enables carbon tracking across the three major cloud providers (Google Cloud, AWS, Azure), using billing and consumption data.

In Data Engineering and Cloud Computing, accurately measuring the carbon impact of infrastructure and energy usage is challenging.

A comprehensive estimation of a cloud provider’s impact includes three scopes, as defined by the GHG Protocol:

• Scope 1: Direct emissions (e.g., generators, company vehicles).
• Scope 2: Indirect emissions from purchased energy (e.g., electricity from various sources).
• Scope 3: Indirect emissions from the supply chain (e.g., data center construction, hardware, waste management).

Cloud providers offer their own carbon impact calculators, but they have limitations:

• AWS does not include Scope 3 and provides only a quarterly report with limited details.
• Azure covers all three scopes but excludes certain regions (Germany, China, India), which may have higher emissions, and uses an opaque methodology.
• Google Cloud provides detailed reports for all three scopes, but its emission coefficients are not publicly available.

Cloud Carbon Footprint stands out by using a public methodology and emission coefficients, making it an independent standard that is continuously updated by the open-source community. However, its coefficients are four years old, originally measured by Etsy under the name "Cloud Jewels", making it difficult to assess the accuracy of its estimations.

Theodo’s point of view

Despite outdated coefficients, Cloud Carbon Footprint remains the best available solution for tracking cloud emissions, as cloud provider reports lack transparency. Its setup is quick, thanks to clear documentation. We recommend it for monitoring the carbon footprint of your cloud infrastructure.