The Cost of Data [RubyConfAU]

The internet grows every day. Every second, one of us is making calls to an API, uploading images, and streaming the latest content. But what is the cost of this—is it free? This talk explores the reality of data, and what responsibilities we have as creators and consumers of tech.

Transcript

1. Vaidehi Joshi The Cost of Data
2. The Cost of Data Vaidehi Joshi
5. I love learning how stuff works!
6. The internet
7. The internet is built on many things.
8. Everything we put on the web is stored somewhere.
9. But how many of us think about this?
10. I certainly didn’t! Until recently.
11. Data center
12. https://pixabay.com/photos/server-space-the-server-room-dark-2160321
13. https://www.flickr.com/photos/ibm_media/33838065805
14. Cloud Providers
15. 65% utilization rate on ☁ 15% utilization rate in
16. 65% utilization rate on ☁ 15% utilization rate in ¼ fewer servers provisioned
17. Percentage of data center traffic from ☁ 0 0.25 0.5 0.75 1 2016 2021 96% 88%
18. Seems good, right?
19. SLA
20. No downtime?
22. ❄
23. Hard to find data
24. ~200 TWh 1-3% of world’s electricity 1 TWh = 1 trillion watts/hour
25. The ICT sector creates 2% of greenhouse gas emissions.
26. The ICT sector’s carbon footprint is the same as the airline industry.
27. Why??
28. Why?? Fossil fuels
29. The State of Data Center Energy Use in 2018, Paul Johnston & Anne Currie
30. 5 carbon neutral zones Offset your emissions*
31. 5 carbon neutral zones Offset your emissions* *a carbon offset still means you’re emitting greenhouse gasses
32. Not very transparent
33. US-East-1 Dominion Energy
34. US-East-1 +59%
35. Carbon fee model ✅
36. Investments Renewable energy certificates (RECs)
37. Not entirely transparent .
38. Carbon offsets $$$ renewable energy +1 clean KWh back into the grid for each dirty 1 KWh used
39. Carbon offsets $$$ renewable energy +1 clean KWh back into the grid for each dirty 1 KWh used
40. China 66% increase in China’s data center industry between 2019-2023
41. No public data Limited renewables
42. How will this scale into the future?
43. It’s easy to increase usage.
44. Global data traffic is growing.
45. 28 billion
46. Connected IoT devices (billions) 0 5 10 15 20 2017 2020 20 8.4
47. © IEA
48. © nature
49. We need to think about this problem.
50. Some of us are.
55. Each of us has agency, too.
56. Find out where your data lives.
58. Migrate to a green region.
59. Draw attention to this issue.
61. Build things!
63. Be aware.
64. Denise Yu Paul Johnston Anne Currie @deniseyu21 @pauldjohnston @anne_e_currie
65. We are using a finite resource.
66. We don’t know what the cost of data will be.
67. I’m optimistic.
68. You have a voice in this.
69. Will you use it?
70. Thank you! @vaidehijoshi https://bit.ly/2SH1Kk8