Carbon-aware workloads are necessary for enabling workload placement and scheduling to optimize system carbon emissions.
Quality-of-service requirements such as latency, geographic restrictions, and mission-critical elements of these workloads can be communicated back to the management system. This enables the management system to identify and prioritize workloads that have the flexibility to alternate their scheduling and/or placement. The Green Software Foundation has a working group focused on developing an SDK to enable carbon-aware applications.
As we can see, there are pathways to zero-carbon clouds that can help accelerate the coming transition to a low-carbon economy. Innovations that maximize the productive use of cloud infrastructure will bring significant economic and environmental benefits. And managing workloads to use the cleanest energy can help stabilize the grid and provide lower-cost electricity. Some of these innovations can leverage existing capabilities. Others will require the maturation and adoption of emerging capabilities, such as hybrid cloud bursting to provide on-demand capacity for peak loads.
