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KATIE SUNDSTROM: There are so many areas where sustainability
is important, and there are a lot of different areas
that you can focus on.
I think that computing isn't one that
comes to mind for many people right away.
It might be easier to think about wanting
to make sure you recycle and things like that,
things that are more tangible.
But then computing, when it's off in the cloud,
you don't necessarily realize how much energy you're using,
and it doesn't necessarily occur to you to reduce it.
But it's actually a really important place
to reduce energy use.
At Etsy, in 2021, 35% of the business's total energy use
was from computing, 35%, so it's an important area
to work to reduce and to make an impact.
ALEXANDRINA GARCIA-VERDIN: Hi, I'm AGV, and welcome.
Meet Katie from Etsy.
She's been working with her peers
to reduce the business's use of electricity, especially
the kind that powers their compute resources.
Their intention is to reduce carbon emissions
from running IT operations.
Katie and I are both super passionate about this topic,
and together, we wanted to share some helpful tools that you
can apply in your organization.
So let's dive in.
For those of you new to Etsy, it is a digital marketplace
that helps creative entrepreneurs set up
their online business and get found globally,
such as hand-making crafters or vintage sellers.
For example, I use their site to find
organically sourced clothing.
The company focuses on many aspects of sustainability,
and so I asked Katie to share briefly on this.
KATIE SUNDSTROM: Etsy has a really comprehensive approach
to reducing emissions from its business.
We are measuring and working to reduce
the energy and carbon that's used by our users,
by our offices, by our employees who are commuting,
our employees who are working from home,
by our supply chain, our shipping and packaging,
and, of course, our computing.
We're offsetting 100% of carbon emissions
from shipping and packaging.
We're striving to maintain zero-waste offices.
We have a team of folks working on advocacy.
We're advocating for regulation that
will reduce emissions of the logistics
and the transportation sector.
We're working on reducing emissions in our supply chain
with partners, like Google, and we're also
encouraging both Etsy buyers and sellers to be thoughtful.
We hope we can encourage Etsy buyers to shop locally and Etsy
sellers to reuse packaging and use packaging that's
as friendly to the environment as it can possibly be.
ALEXANDRINA GARCIA-VERDIN: Now, this journey
doesn't happen overnight.
It takes incremental steps and a commitment
to want to measure things that, before, really weren't
on our radar.
For example, one can begin asking,
where does my energy come from, and does the energy source
change at nighttime versus in the daytime?
That simple question paired with spending just a few minutes
looking up your area's energy source via a wonderful and free
website called Electricity Map that partners with Google
can help anyone see when renewable energy may
be most available to them, and we
start with this excellent question
since electricity historically was sourced
by burning fossil fuels.
But this has been changing over the last decade
thanks to huge investments and accessibility
in renewable and non-carbon-producing energy,
like solar, wind, geothermal, et cetera, which gives us
cleaner energy choices.
For Google specifically, it has been
important to mitigate 100% of its global and customer energy
use by purchasing the same amount in renewable energy.
I'm also very proud to say that, by 2030, we
are focused on the ambitious goal of operating our data
centers on 100% carbon-free energy.
But until then, it's important for each of us
to reduce our IT emissions by making simple decisions
on the time of day and the regions
that power our resources with cleaner energy.
So let me walk you through some quick recommendations.
For starters, you can visit your Carbon Footprint Dashboard
within your Cloud Console.
Folks with billing admin rights can review the built-in charts
that currently show emissions data by project, by month,
by Cloud product, by region, et cetera.
I note that this same functionality will also
be available for Workspace customers early next year.
To perform custom analytics, visualizations,
or use this data for environmental scope 3
reporting, you can export this data to BigQuery.
And as a friendly reminder on carbon reporting,
though, there's an awesome framework
that helps organizations take inventory of their emissions
as three buckets or scopes.
Scope 1 and 2 identifies emissions that are directly
under your control, and then there's
scope 3, which refers to indirect emissions,
such as activities from transportation, suppliers,
or the eventual disposal of products by your consumers,
to just name a few.
The next step is to select regions
that are powered by cleaner energy within your Cloud
projects.
To help with this, Google introduced
a metric called the Carbon-Free Energy percent, or CFE, which
means regions with higher CFEs produce less carbon emissions.
In many of Google Cloud's products,
when choosing a region, there's also a friendly, low CO2 icon
in the Cloud Console.
This icon is also annotated in the Locations
page of the documentation for different products.
But if you're looking for proactive advice on what
regions to use when comparing other factors,
like pricing or latency, there's the fantastic Region Picker
tool.
You can even set organizational policies
to low carbon mode, which makes any new resources be
created in low carbon intensive regions.
You can also set up restrictions on where resources should
be located by using the policy value box,
and entering the "in" prefix, and then a specific string
for one or multiple locations.
Another equally important tip is to go ahead
and delete unused VMs, as well as shut down inactive projects.
This is where Google's Active Assist tool is super handy
since it uses machine learning to proactively
generate carbon-reducing suggestions just for you.
The next recommendation is to avoid resources
from running 24 hours a day, especially
for development and testing.
And so, for example, by shifting resources
to operate 10 hours a day during five workdays a week,
you can reduce your footprint by 70%,
which is an impactful and cost-saving move.
And finally, by using managed servers,
you gain two key benefits.
First, you can separate storage from your virtual machines,
which prevents incurring storage costs for idle resources.
And second, you can refactor monolithic applications
into microservices, which operate
as self-contained, modular functions that
have less dependencies.
This means they are easier to debug,
and you can scale their resources.
So with that being said, friends,
wherever you are on your sustainability journey,
I hope this concise list of helpful tools
inspires you to try one or more today.
And for those interested in going deeper in this work,
let's go back and learn some more from Katie.
KATIE SUNDSTROM: Etsy's journey of measuring our energy usage
in the cloud probably started around 2016
when we were moving from our on-premises servers
to Google Cloud, and one of the reasons
we knew we wanted to move to Google Cloud
was that we knew it would mean energy efficiency wins for us.
We knew we would use less energy in the Cloud
than we were using on premises.
We, at that time, developed the Cloud Tools Methodology
for measuring energy usage in the cloud,
and this is open sourced.
You can see it on our blog, "Code as Craft."
You can also access it on our GitHub repo,
and essentially, what the methodology
does is it takes our Google Cloud billing data, which
includes usage units, which might correspond with CPU,
storage, networking, memory, all different services of Google's
that we're using.
And we are translating those usage units
into energy usage units, specifically, kilowatt hours.
And when we open sourced this methodology,
it was really exciting to see Thoughtworks,
a global consulting agency.
They have a green cloud team, and they
picked it up and ran with it.
They expanded it, both within Google Cloud,
as well as to other cloud providers, like Azure and AWS.
We at Etsy are still currently using
that, like, homegrown tool of cloud joules.
We've got a data visualization tool we're using internally.
We've incorporated cloud joules into our experimentation
platform.
So when Etsy product teams are going to release a new feature,
they're going to test it out on the site
to see what its impact is and whether it's going to achieve
what they wanted to achieve.
So in addition to being able to understand what
the impact of their feature will be on buyers, sellers, web page
performance, things like that, they're
actually going to be able to tell how much energy it's using
and whether it's using more energy than the old version
or if it's using less energy, if it's got energy wins.
And so that means they can incorporate energy
into their decision making about whether they're
going to release a feature, and I
think we also are excited to see what a lot of other companies
are doing.
There's one, Organic Basics, a clothing website
that they have published a low impact manifesto,
and they've also open sourced a low-impact version
of their website.
So as a user, you can go on to their site,
and you can shop via the traditional experience.
Or you can actually opt into a low-impact experience
so that you are loading fewer assets,
using less computing resources so
that you're having less of an impact
as you browse their website.
I think there is so much that we can all learn from each other,
so I really--
I'm so excited seeing these companies doing this great work
and then open sourcing it so that other folks can pick it
up.
Because I think we all have to really work together and learn
from each other if we're going to make
the change that is needed.
ALEXANDRINA GARCIA-VERDIN: I love these examples.
They are super inspiring, and as a fun fact,
I learned that this engineering sustainability group at Etsy
was first initially made up of just passionate volunteers,
until they eventually got full to head count.
And so I asked Katie to share some tips on this journey
as well.
KATIE SUNDSTROM: I think, whether you're
at a small or a large company, when
you don't have sustainability already integrated
into the culture, sort of, like, embedded in the company's
goals, it can feel like an uphill battle to get there.
But it's absolutely possible.
I think anywhere, you need to start small maybe
with just one person who's volunteering
to drive the effort forward or one person who is actually
a dedicated employee for the effort.
And I think that's definitely how we saw it grow at Etsy.
Specifically in this area of reducing energy from computing,
we started off as volunteers.
We were a working group called Sustainable Compute of folks
from across the company who were interested in measuring
and reducing Etsy's energy usage from computing,
and as our contributions to the company grew,
our responsibilities grew as well.
And when they became too much for a group of volunteers
to manage, we put in a proposal and said,
we think this work needs to be funded full time.
So we're very excited that, now, we
have a systems architect for sustainability at Etsy.
So I think that, whether you're, like I said,
a group of volunteers, or you have folks who are actually
dedicated to the effort, it is absolutely possible
to make change.
And I think what you want to do is
you want to get sustainability, energy reduction,
for instance, in a company goal.
Once it's in a goal for the company,
you have folks who are working towards it
and who want to achieve it.
ALEXANDRINA GARCIA-VERDIN: I couldn't agree more
with Katie on this.
Well, community, before we end on a final fun fact
that, I think, is so beautiful, I
want to leave you with the biggest takeaway,
and that's that the most impactful way
to reduce your cloud emissions right now
is to pick compute regions that have the lowest carbon
intensity possible.
KATIE SUNDSTROM: A fun fact about the work
that I've done for sustainability at Etsy
is that, now, in my personal life,
I find I put so much more thought into specifically
energy usage from computing.
It's really maybe easier to understand
when you are drinking from a single-use plastic container
or something like that, what your impact is.
But now, when I'm sending a text, I'm thinking,
I wonder how much energy I'm using?
When I'm writing my grocery list on the app on my phone,
I'm wondering, how much energy am I using?
So it's definitely sort of infiltrated
my personal life as well.
ALEXANDRINA GARCIA-VERDIN: Thank you for being here with me.
Have a beautiful day.
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