Hacker News Reader

Comment by invalidname | Hacker News Reader

While the article is interesting I would be more interested in details about carbon footprint and cost reduction. Also how would this impact more typical node, Java loads?

View on HN

AWS is pushing to move its internal services (most which are in Java) to graviton, so I would expect it to be excellent for “normal” workloads/languages

Virtually 100% of cloud operating expenses are electricity, so you can pretty much assume that if it costs less it has a lower carbon footprint.

+ Rent, support staff, development costs, regulation and compliance, network, maintenance (cooling, fire suppression + lots more), marketing.

Speaking as someone who did sys admin for a small independent cloud provider, it definitely isn't virtually 100% of operating costs

No offense intended to your personal experience, but I don't think "small independent cloud" is terribly important in the global analysis. This paper concludes that TDP and TCO have become the same thing, i.e. power is heat, power is opex.

https://www.gwern.net/docs/ai/scaling/hardware/2021-jouppi.p...

One key call out re: power from that paper - "Most OpEx cost is for provisioning power and not for electricity use [2], so saving power already provisioned for doesn’t improve TCO as much as one might hope."

I'd peg it closer to 75%. There's some significant opex on the endpoint connectivity side as well. That's why a lot of these providers are buying stakes in some of the transoceanic cable projects (and some terrestrial ones as well). Or they're agreeing not to charge each other (kind of sort of- see open bandwidth alliance).

Depreciation is an operating expense. Not a cash expense, but if you ignore depreciation you’ll end up like Detroit.

The paper I cited did not ignore depreciation.

You know, if you wanted to improve carbon footprint, a better place to look might be at software bloat. The sheer number of times things get encoded and decoded to text is mind boggling. Especially in "typical node, Java loads".

Logging and Cybersecurity are bloaty areas as well. I've seen plenty of AWS cost breakdowns where the cybersec functions were the highest percentage of spend. Or desktops where carbon black, or windows defender were using most of the CPU or IO cycles. And networks where syslog traffic was the biggest percentage of traffic.

Norton, Symantec, and McAfee contribute greatly to global warming in the financial services sector. At least half of CPU cycles on employee laptops are devoted to them.

But do they actually work? For years I've been of the opinion that most anti-virus solutions don't actually stop virusses, instead they give you a false sense of security and their messaging is intentionally alarmist to make individuals and organizations pay their subscription fees.

In my limited and sheltered experience, the only viruses I've gotten in the past decade or so was from dodgy pirated stuff or big "download" button ads on download sites.

At best they don’t work, in reality they are an attack vector themselves and a performance nightmare. They should (mostly) not exist.

Presumably then they're knocking hours off the laptops' battery lives?

As AWS doesn't price services based on carbon footprint, you can't infer the carbon footprint from the cost.

I agree however that certain AWS services are disproportional expensive.

Presumably the price provides some sort of bounds.

(Unless they are doing something like putting profits towards some sort of carbon maximization scheme)

Well and a fair amount of cybersec oriented services are a pattern of "sniff and copy every bit of data and do something with it" or "trawl all state". Which is inherently heavy.

This has been looked at; the electricity savings of more efficient programming are too small to be worth it with a fixed compute capacity. However, if you can reduce the amount of machines or machine-time you require, that can become material.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com