The Cost of Data (RailsConf 2021)

The internet grows every day. Every second, one of us is making calls to an API, uploading some images, or streaming the latest video content. But what is the cost of all this?

Every day, a data center stores information on our behalf. As engineers, it's easy to focus on the code and forget the tangible impact of our work. This talk explores the physical reality of creating and storing data today, as well as the challenges and technological advancements currently being made in this part of the tech sector. Together, we'll see how our code affects the physical world, and what we can do about it.

Transcript

1. The Cost of Data @vaidehijoshi
4. How and where we store our data
5. Every piece of data is stored somewhere
6. https://www.flickr.com/photos/ibm_media/33838065805 Data center
7. Cloud providers
8. Cloud providers
9. How do they keep things running?
10. Redundancy
11. Servers are demanding
12. 200-500 terawatt (TWh) hours a year
13. 1 TWh = 1 trillion watts of energy/hour
15. 1-3% of global electricity
16. Where does that energy come from?
17. Fossil fuels
18. Impact depends on energy source
19. 2% of greenhouse gas emissions
20. What are we doing about this?
21. The State of Data Center Energy Use in 2018, Addendum
22. The State of Data Center Energy Use in 2018, Paul Johnston & Anne Currie
24. 5 carbon neutral zones
26. Carbon offset
27. Still emitting greenhouse gases
28. US-East-1 🚨 🚨
29. Lack of transparency
31. Carbon offsets for all servers
32. One clean KWh for each dirty KWh used
34. Real-time matching
35. How will this scale?
36. Global data traffic is growing
37. nature ©
38. We’ve already started solving for this
39. What can I do?
40. Find out where your data lives
41. Migrate to a green region
42. Talk about it with your team
43. Hold companies accountable
45. Build something
47. Think about what you use
50. Be aware
51. We are using a finite resource
52. We don’t know what it will cost us
53. We can push the needle forward
54. Thank you! 🌍 costofdata.dev