Cloudflare stated in July 2021 that, while the company did not begin with the intention of reducing the environmental impact of the Internet, that has changed. Its mission is to assist in the construction of a better Internet, and clearly, a better Internet must be sustainable.
As Cloudflare continues to seek efficiencies in every component of its network hardware, every piece of software it develops, and every Internet protocol it supports, it also wants to understand how moving network security, performance, and reliability functions such as those provided by Cloudflare from on-premise solutions to the cloud affects sustainability.
To that end, it commissioned a study earlier this year from the consulting firm Analysys Mason to compare the relative carbon efficiency of network functions such as firewalls, WAF, SD-WAN, DDoS protection, content servers, and others provided by Cloudflare to similar on-premise solutions.
Although the full report will not be available until next year, the company is pleased to report that preliminary findings show:
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF) “generates up to around 90% less carbon than on-premises appliances at low-medium traffic demand.”
Needless to say, Cloudflare is excited about the potential of these early findings and eagerly awaits the full report, which early indications suggest will show additional ways in which moving to Cloudflare will help reduce a company’s infrastructure’s carbon footprint. However, as with most things at Cloudflare, this is just the start.
The Internet has a number of environmental impacts that need to be addressed, including raw material extraction, water consumption by data centers, and recycling and e-waste, among many others. But, none of those are more urgent than energy and emissions.
Energy generation, according to the United Nations, is the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for approximately 35% of global emissions. When you consider the amount of power required to run servers, routers, switches, data centers, and Internet exchanges around the world, it’s not surprising that the Boston Consulting Group discovered that the Internet accounts for 2% of total carbon output, or about 1 billion metric tons per year.
Reduced emissions from energy consumption are conceptually simple: transition to zero-emission energy sources and use energy more efficiently to accelerate that transition. However, applying those concepts to a geographically distributed, disparate network and system like the global Internet is infinitely more difficult.
Much has been written about increasing the efficiency of individual pieces of network hardware (such as Cloudflare’s deployment of more efficient Arm CPUs) and the power usage efficiency (or “PUE”) of hyperscale data centers. Cloudflare, on the other hand, believes that significant efficiency gains can be made across all layers of the network stack, as well as the basic architecture of the Internet itself. This research is the first step in investigating those uncharted territories.
Because the final report is still being written, there will be more information about its methodology upon publication. But, here is what is known so far.
To estimate the relative carbon savings of moving enterprise network functions, like those offered by Cloudflare, to the cloud, the Analysys Mason team is evaluating a wide range of enterprise network functions. These include firewalls, WAF, SD-WAN, DDoS protection, and content servers. For each function they are modelling a variety of scenarios, including usage, different sizes and types of organizations, and different operating conditions.
Information relating to the power and capacity of each on-premise appliance is being sourced from public data sheets from relevant vendors. Information on Cloudflare’s energy consumption is being compiled from internal datasets of total power usage of Cloudflare servers, and the allocation of CPU resources and traffic between different products.
The final report is expected in early 2023, according to the Analysys Mason team. Until then, the initial WAF results described above may be subject to change as the project continues, and assumptions and methodology are refined. Regardless, these are exciting developments, and the company hopes to share the full report with you soon!
