Cloud providers generally do not disclose to customers how much energy their services consume, the reason why Etsy team created a conversion factors called Cloud Jewels to help estimating energy used in the cloud. This isn’t meant as a replacement for energy use data or guidance from Google, Amazon or another provider. Nor can we guarantee the accuracy of the rough estimates the tool provides. Instead, it’s meant to give a sense of energy usage and relative changes over time based on aggregated data on how we use the cloud, in light of publicly-available information.
Cloud Jewels coefficients
The following coefficients are their estimates for how many watt-hours (Wh) it takes to run a virtual server and how many watt-hours (Wh) it takes to store a terabyte of data on HDD (hard disk drive) or SSD (solid-state drive) disks in a cloud computing environment:
2.10 Wh per vCPUh [Server]
0.89 Wh/TBh for HDD storage [Storage]
1.52 Wh/TBh for SSD storage [Storage]
So now if you are migrating to the cloud or you already did, this is a great easy conversion tool to get a rough estimates of energy consumption in the cloud. Per vCPUh and TBh per storage (HDD or SSD). At Etsy they found a great saving in energy in five years equivalent to almost 20,000 sewing machines (running 24/7).
