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thegreenwebfoundation / carbon.txt

A proposed convention for making it possible demonstrate that your infrastucture uses green power
Apache License 2.0
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Define a way for provider locations to be specified #20

Open fershad opened 1 year ago

fershad commented 1 year ago

There are cases when one might use a provider's service in just one or a couple of regions. For example, you might use Object Storage services from Provider X, but only provision those services in that provider's us-east location.

In the current carbon.txt specification, there is no way to capture this detail. To provide more granularity and transparency through carbon.txt, there should be a method through which implementors can specify the provider regions they use as part of their service.

fershad commented 1 year ago

One proposal is to allow this to be included as an array for a provider. For example, the key of region can be set with an array of strings identifying the regions used.

[upstream]
providers = [
    { domain='amazon.com', service='object-storage', regions=['us-east-1', 'eu-east-2'] }
]
mrchrisadams commented 1 year ago

Thanks Fish - this was initially something we wanted to support in the green web directory when providers list the services they offer, and I agree it would be helpful.

We had some plans to infer this based on IP addresses, but directly declaring it has advantages too, as IP based look ups (or at least ipv4 ones) look like they will become less reliable over time.

This issue is worth knowing about too, as @rossf and I spent some time thinking how a provider might expose these numbers on a per-region / per datacentre level:

https://github.com/thegreenwebfoundation/grid-intensity-go/issues/59