mrchrisadams
commented
3 weeks ago This is interesting - I saw that Fastly announced a sustainability dashboard on their new free plan announcement today:
This led me to find this:
https://docs.fastly.com/en/guides/about-the-sustainability-dashboard
So we know the data exists - presumably we'd at least be able to show which DCs are green, like we do with other regions and tools.
It might not be something customers can control right now, but we know there are ways you can design systems to trade-off carbon and latency depending on your organisational priorities.
We've had papers on how to do this shared at Hot Carbon for a few years now for example
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
A clear and concise description of what the problem is. Ex. I'm always frustrated when [...]
People are using Fast.ly as a CDN, who do not show up as green, and because our system is primarily based around IP range lookups, even if they are using a green provider, they show up as grey.
Describe the solution you'd like A clear and concise description of what you want to happen.
Ideally? We import Fast.ly's IP ranges from here, like we do with other very large providers.
https://developer.fastly.com/reference/api/utils/public-ip-list/
We can link to some public evidence of them acting on the carbon emissions that their infrastructure is causing.
They are a publicly traded company with sustainability staff, but I couldn't find any mention of sustainability, carbon or even energy in their most recent SEC filing, nor any sustainability report.
Until we can point to evidence of action, we can't really say they're doing anything material.
We list what we accept here for lookups to show as green:
https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/news/what-we-accept-as-evidence-of-green-power/
Describe alternatives you've considered
A clear and concise description of any alternative solutions or features you've considered that might help serve as a possible solution.
We outline a process for folks to show as green if they are using infrastructure providers who might not be moving as fast as they would like, but can't switch to a new provider. The short version is that you take on the responsibility (and cost) of making for you have accounted for the emissions if they don't:
https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/support/im-using-a-cloud-provider-why-is-my-site-showing-as-grey/
There is a separate issue about our IP based approach working with CDNs. Assuming we have the correct supporting evidence and we load in the Fastly IPs, some providers may still want to show up as the provider of a given service, instead of Fastly.
For that scenario we have carbon txt approach - we parse that and use some of that info instead. We'd use this if
a) the the IP based look up process doesn't work in a particular scenario b) we can point to the underlying provider accounting for the emissions from the intermediate provider separately.
This is the scenario with Salesforce owning Heroku, who use AWS. Salesforce account for AWS as their scope 3, which they have assumed responsibility for.
The alternative in this case would likely be recommend people use their rivals Cloudflare and Akamai, who DO provide some evidence in the public domain that we can refer to.
Additional context