Hi Watchers!
The emissions trackers in the customer area of the hyperscaler cloud services do not permit predicting the emissions from usage ahead of time. They don’t allow an A/B of which location to use and what use case will give the lowest emissions.
The team at the French consulting firm Carbone4 did a valuable analysis of the emissions calculators available to customers at: AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, and OVHCloud.
Google’s is by far the best, even though it doesn’t allow prediction. It defines the boundary on 3 scopes, it covers all usage, and – most remarkably – it uses real-time location-based emissions for the power that actually ran the usage.
My longstanding recommendation of Google among the large hyperscalers remains in place!
Thank you to the team at Carbone4 for their excellent research. Thank you also the amazing Green Software Foundation for publicizing the study.
Take a look!
https://www.carbone4.com/en/article-digital-cloud-hidden-emissions