Scaleable renewable infrastructure?

[samuk]

Is it possible in 2021 to design scaleable infrastructure that only uses data centres powered by renewable energy?

https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/directory/

Building infrastructure from scratch to be renewable might be easier than trying to do it retrospectively once a load of dirty Digital Ocean and AWS services are involved?

low carbon Kubernetes scheduler makes scaling decisions based on the emissions intensity across regions http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2382/ICT4S2019_paper_28.pdf

I see your website is on Cloudflare https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/green-web-check/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fvircadia.com%2F

[daleglass]

I don't see why not. At the core, all you need is some place where to run domains (most any Linux VM host will do), and a place to host data on HTTP (lots of choice there). The infrastructure required isn't complicated, and providers for what's required are very plentiful.

[samuk]

Has Vircadia taken a strategic decision not to pursue a renewable energy strategy?

https://github.com/vircadia/vircadia/issues/1372#issuecomment-927263148

FOSS/ Data protecting/ renewable would be a compelling USP to offer IMHO. I appreciate I can set up my own renewable/ data protecting infrastructure, but that's different to having a SAAS with those features.

[daleglass]

No.

It's a small project, most infrastructure decisions were taken on basis like "Where I happened to have an account already", or "what I was familiar with", and such. To my knowledge, nobody discussed using or not using renewable energy before you brought it up.

[samuk]

Thanks, Dale, I'd be interested in helping think this through. Short-term pragmatic decisions are fine, but it does seem that there may be some strategic value to having a policy and considering this.

The type of clients interested in Vircadia may include a good number who have sustainability on their agenda.

Now maybe the moment to decide if you care about this stuff or not, before a bunch of infrastructure is deployed.

[daleglass]

That could be an option, we'd have to discuss it and think about it of course.

But have in mind that Vircadia's own infrastructure is small and we don't expect it to grow very much either.

We're mostly a bunch of developers making tools for others to use, so most infrastructure would be owned by end users. Of course we have some like the website, hosting for the downloads and a few official community spaces, but the aim of the project is to be distributed and not to centralize content under our own control.

[samuk]

These people seem to do a managed kubernetes in green datacentres https://www.cloudandheat.com/

Or you could roll your own on Hetzner for Europe https://blog.iankok.com/setting-up-kubernetes-with-rancher-on-hetzner

Alongside Google Cloud for N. America / Other geo & https://rancher.com/blog/2020/running-google-cloud-containers-with-rancher

[stale[bot]]

Hello! Is this still an issue?