Towards transparent and trustworthy cloud carbon accounting

Climate Change is arguably the biggest challenge that humanity faces today. Multiple trends such as the exponential explosion of data transfer, the emergence and popularity of power intensive workloads such as AI, and the flattening of Moore's law contribute to a rising concern over the increasing carbon footprint cost of digital computation. Any effective strategy to reduce the energy consumption and associated carbon footprint of computations must begin with an accurate and transparent quantification method. However, while most businesses today run a significant portion of their workloads on third party cloud environments, transparent carbon quantification of tenant workloads in cloud environments is lacking. This regretful situation inhibits reliable reporting of Scope 3 Green House Gas (GHG) by cloud users, meaningful comparison of cloud carbon efficiencies, and measurable reduction strategies. In this extended abstract we explain the unique challenges that arise in multi-tenant cloud environments, and propose and discuss an approach, consistent with the GHG Protocol, for cloud carbon footprint quantification. The quantification is a first step towards sustainable cloud environments, that employ dynamic controllers to quantify and reduce the carbon footprint at every layer of the cloud stack.