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
   

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4. How and where
   we store our data
   

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5. Every piece of data
   is stored somewhere
   

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6. https://www.flickr.com/photos/ibm_media/33838065805
   Data center
   

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7. Cloud providers
   

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8. Cloud providers
   

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9. How do they keep
   things running?
   

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10. Redundancy
    

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11. Servers are
    demanding
    

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12. 200-500 terawatt
    (TWh) hours a year
    

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13. 1 TWh = 1 trillion
    watts of energy/hour
    

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15. 1-3% of global
    electricity
    

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16. Where does that
    energy come from?
    

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17. Fossil fuels
    

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18. Impact depends
    on energy source
    

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19. 2% of greenhouse
    gas emissions
    

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20. What are we
    doing about this?
    

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21. The State of Data Center Energy Use in 2018, Addendum
    

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22. The State of Data Center Energy Use in 2018, Paul Johnston & Anne Currie
    

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24. 5 carbon neutral
    zones
    

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26. Carbon offset
    

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27. Still emitting
    greenhouse gases
    

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28. US-East-1
    🚨 🚨
    

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29. Lack of transparency
    

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31. Carbon offsets
    for all servers
    

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32. One clean KWh for
    each dirty KWh used
    

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34. Real-time
    matching
    

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35. How will
    this scale?
    

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36. Global data
    traffic is growing
    

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37. nature
    ©
    

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38. We’ve already started
    solving for this
    

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39. What can I do?
    

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40. Find out where
    your data lives
    

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41. Migrate to a
    green region
    

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42. Talk about it
    with your team
    

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43. Hold companies
    accountable
    

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45. Build
    something
    

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47. Think about
    what you use
    

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50. Be aware
    

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51. We are using
    a finite resource
    

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52. We don’t know
    what it will cost us
    

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53. We can push the
    needle forward
    

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54. Thank you! 🌍
    costofdata.dev
    

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