Sacrifice speed to cut cloud carbon and costs

New findings from research by Uptime Institute Intelligence reveals that organizations can cut both their cloud carbon emissions and costs by moving workloads to different regions. However, the trade off with this migration is an increase in latency.

Cloud users choose regions based primarily on two factors:

1. Locating the application close to end users improves the user experience by delivering faster content. Some applications, such as interactive gaming, require very low latency, which is driving cloud providers to invest in new edge locations close to end users. Not all applications, however, need such a quick response and end users can often tolerate a slight increase in latency without material impact to their experience.
2. Offering cloud-based services in a country usually has implications regarding data protection and this can be partly addressed by keeping data within the same jurisdiction as their end users.

If there are no legal reasons to keep data in a jurisdiction, cloud users can often migrate their workloads to a nearby region and gain reductions in their carbon footprint; this migration can also result in lower costs. Uptime Intelligence collated information from Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, the Cloud Carbon Footprint project (which sources data from carbonfootprint.com, the European Environment Agency and the US Environmental Protection Agency) and CloudPing to produce the Cloud Carbon Explorer, which includes three interactive maps.