Google has announced that it has added new tools to its cloud offering which are designed to give users more control over the carbon emissions generated when using the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
This comes after an analysis of the aggregate data from all customers across Google Cloud, which found over 600,000 gross kgCO2e in seemingly idle projects that could be cleaned up or reclaimed — which would have a similar impact to planting almost 10,000 trees.
The new Active Assist sustainability recommendations are part of Google Cloud’s AIOps solution that uses data, intelligence, and machine learning to reduce cloud complexity and administrative toil. The Active Assist portfolio – including products and tools like Policy Intelligence, Network Intelligence Center, Predictive Autoscaler, and a collection of Recommendations for various Google Cloud services – is geared towards helping users achieve their sustainability targets and reduce the carbon footprint of their workloads.
With the Unattended Project Recommender, it is now possible to estimate the gross carbon emissions saved by removing idle projects with Active Assist. Providing utilisation insights for all the projects in an organisation, and using machine learning to identify ones that are idle and most likely unattended, the software can also estimate the impact of removing an idle project in terms of kilograms of CO2 reduced per month.
Increasing the sustainability of digital applications and infrastructure is a priority for 90 per cent of global IT leaders, and Google will be continuing to invest across a number of product areas in Google Cloud, including AIOps features like Active Assist’s recommendations, to help businesses make progress towards their sustainability goals.
To that end, the Carbon Sense suite is a collection of features that makes it easy to accurately report carbon emissions, and reduce them. Active Assist joins products like Carbon Footprint, which provides businesses with the ability to understand and measure the gross carbon emissions of their Google Cloud usage, as well as low-carbon signals, which help users choose cleaner regions to run their workloads, in the Carbon Sense suite.
