This document in the Google Cloud Architecture Framework summarizes how you can approach environmental sustainability for your workloads in Google Cloud. It includes information about how to minimize your carbon footprint on Google Cloud.
Understand your carbon footprint
To understand the carbon footprint from your Google Cloud usage, use the Carbon Footprint dashboard. The Carbon Footprint dashboard attributes emissions to the Google Cloud projects that you own and the cloud services that you use.
Choose the most suitable cloud regions
One effective way to reduce carbon emissions is to choose cloud regions with lower carbon emissions. To help you make this choice, Google publishes carbon data for all Google Cloud regions.
When you choose a region, you might need to balance lowering emissions with other requirements, such as pricing and network latency. To help select a region, use the Google Cloud Region Picker.
Choose the most suitable cloud services
To help reduce your existing carbon footprint, consider migrating your on-premises VM workloads to Compute Engine.
Consider serverless options for workloads that don't need VMs. These managed services often optimize resource usage automatically, reducing costs and carbon footprint.
Minimize idle cloud resources
Idle resources incur unnecessary costs and emissions. Some common causes of idle resources include the following:
- Unused active cloud resources, such as idle VM instances.
- Over-provisioned resources, such as larger VM instances machine types than necessary for a workload.
- Non-optimal architectures, such as lift-and-shift migrations that aren't always optimized for efficiency. Consider making incremental improvements to these architectures.
The following are some general strategies to help minimize wasted cloud resources:
- Identify idle or overprovisioned resources and either delete them or rightsize them.
- Refactor your architecture to incorporate a more optimal design.
- Migrate workloads to managed services.
Reduce emissions for batch workloads
Run batch workloads in regions with lower carbon emissions. For further reductions, run workloads at times that coincide with lower grid carbon intensity when possible.
What's next
- Learn how to use Carbon Footprint data to measure, report, and reduce your cloud carbon emissions.