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Last reviewed 2024-08-27 UTC
This document in theGoogle Cloud Well-Architected Frameworksummarizes how you can approach environmental sustainability for your workloads
in Google Cloud. It includes information about how to minimize your carbon
footprint on Google Cloud.
Understand your carbon footprint
To understand the carbon footprint from your Google Cloud usage, use theCarbon Footprintdashboard. The Carbon Footprint dashboard attributes emissions to the
Google Cloud projects that you own and the cloud services that you use.
Choose the most suitable cloud regions
One effective way to reduce carbon emissions is to choose cloudregionswith lower carbon emissions. To help you make this choice, Google
publishes carbon data for all Google Cloud regions.
When you choose a region, you might need to balance lowering emissions with
other requirements, such as pricing and network latency. To help select a
region, use theGoogle Cloud Region Picker.
Choose the most suitable cloud services
To help reduce your existing carbon footprint, consider migrating your
on-premises VM workloads toCompute Engine.
Consider serverless options for workloads that don't need VMs. These
managed services often optimize resource usage automatically, reducing
costs and carbon footprint.
Minimize idle cloud resources
Idle resources incur unnecessary costs and emissions. Some common causes of idle
resources include the following:
Non-optimal architectures, such aslift-and-shiftmigrations that aren't always optimized for efficiency. Consider making
incremental improvements to these architectures.
The following are some general strategies to help minimize wasted cloud
resources:
Identify idle or overprovisioned resources and either delete them or rightsize
them.
Refactor your architecture to incorporate a more optimal design.
Migrate workloads to managed services.
Reduce emissions for batch workloads
Run batch workloads in regions with lower carbon emissions. For further
reductions, run workloads at times that coincide with lower grid carbon
intensity when possible.
What's next
Learn how to useCarbon Footprint datato measure, report, and reduce your cloud carbon emissions.
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