matthiasb

There are a couple points that resonate with me. I strongly believe there is a need to provide transparency and accountability to cloud engineers. How many cloud enginners know the exact list of resources they own in all accounts and regions they have access to? How much money do cloud provider make out abandonned, zombie, long-forgotten resources?

What they built sound nice and feature-rich but also quite complex. I just finished adding a (simplier) feature to the SaaS I am building. It generates individual reports with the list of resources owned by the user, the associated cost and flag for thise which are likely unused.

I will post of Show HN soon, but if you are interested in cloud efficiency, I would love you feedback! https://li10.com

It looks interesting. Is the Basti EC2 instance deployed in a private subnet? Do you have a high-level diagram?

I am working on eliminating waste in cloud resources.

Cloud providers made too easy to start resources. But unless there is a stringent upfront process (that usually defeats the purpose of using the cloud), it is hard to keep track of who owns what, and what is still needed. Decrypting long cloud bills quickly impossible, and users do not have a clear understanding of the per-resource cost they generated.

I believe the solution is rooted in transparency and accountability for both users and cloud providers.

I am creating a tool what generates a cost and security cloud report which is sent weekly for each cloud user or team.

I intend to release it as a open-source tool as well a SaaS service as part of www.li10.com

I am working on a cloud governance and remediation solution.

Our first product was a CO2 monitor for your AWS infrastructure https://www.li10.com/

The next logical step is to provide tools to reduce it (along with cost reduction and security benefits)

Our first iteration is available here: https://github.com/li10labs/li10-governance

yes, but it will give you a misleading number (close to 0 for any workload you run in US or EU). So it is useless.

I totally agree with you! There are so many layers we could optimize, with various level of difficulty and return in term of cost and co2 reduction.

Legacy tech stack are especially wasteful: HW + OS + App running 24/7 regardless if it used or not.

My intuition is that AWS claims they can reduce CO2 emissions from your onprem stack by 80% because *IF* it was rewritten into a serverless app, it would consume energy only when it runs.

That's one big if! https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/mt/how-to-drive-the-discussi....

Shameless plug: we built www.li10.com to help companies using AWS cloud measuring and reducing their cloud carbon footprint.

To measure it, we use your detailed billing data and local kWh carbon intensity.

To reduce it, we are offering a cloud governance tool based on Cloud Custodian to identify and remediate wasteful or/and unsecure cloud resources.

Hi there! I'm Matt. Leader in cloud technologies, with a 17-year track record in both the US and EU. As a Senior Director of Cloud Solution Architecture at NTT DATA, I lead the development of AWS serverless, SaaS, big data, and ML applications. I also coach our cloud engineering talent pool.

Back in the Flux7 days, an AWS consulting startup I called home, we pulled off a solid 50% YoY growth, paving the way for an acquisition by NTT DATA. It was quite an adventure, demanding a blend of technical skills and business acumen.

Dedicated to fostering sustainable IT practices, I built https://www.li10.com, a SaaS helping cloud engineers lighten their cloud environmental footprint.

  Location: Germany
  Remote: Yes, worked remotely for US customers for 6 years
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: AWS, serverless, CI/CD, Python/Node/Typescript, MongoDB, Docker, LLM
  Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattbuchner/
  Email: matthias.buchner@gmail.com

Most cloud providers already claim being carbon neutral for EU and US regions. Unfortunately, there is a lot of waste there too, so there goes the little bit of green energy we have.

What you are saying makes sense. If you are running other valuable apps, then it isn't a waste.

I am curious though, how did you come to 1.75kg per user? I calculated 20.9kg / user / year.

250/1000/1000 kgCO₂eq/Wh x 19.1 Wh x 8760 hours in a year / 2 users = 20.9 kg / user / year

Turning a service on/off makes a lot of sense for this kind of application.

I sincerely didn't post my comment to shame anymore.

Need for computing is growing fast and it is actually not negligible at all. See the link below, data centers emitted 300 MTCo2 in 2020, similar to the number you mentioned.

https://www.iea.org/reports/data-centres-and-data-transmissi...

An idle server still consumes energy. Energy consumption increases with CPU load, RAM consumes the same regardless of the usage.

When Google manages your pictures, they don't have idle servers for each users. This is the main reason their service is more sustainable.

Where did you get the carbon you exhale? Food. If you go by that logic, you might as well stop eating.

The CO2 we exhale does not contribute to climate change because it comes from plants (and indirectly animals) that captures it back.

If you burn coal to produce electricity, it releases CO2 in the atmosphere and it will take a long time to sequester that CO2 back into fossil fuel.

I used an AWS instance with similar specs as reference. What kind of low power servers are you referring too?

Yes, I assumed 1 user per server. If a family shares the server, then you can divide by the number of family members.

The link I shared has the details of the calculation. The calculation assumes 50% CPU load which is most likely too high for this use case.

The recommended spec is 4 cores and 6GB. Running this 24/7 for a year in US where the carbon intensity is about 400 gCO₂eq/kWh would produce about 150kg of CO2 per user per year.

I appreciate the intent of this project, but it is not a sustainable approach.

If you are taking a couple of pictures a day, you only need to run this service for a couple of minutes per day, the rest is wasted. With Google Photos, as a SaaS, users are sharing computing power and each users are emitting less CO2.

https://engineering.teads.com/sustainability/carbon-footprin...

Your answer is spot on.

This makes me think of Yoichi Kaya's formula: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaya_identity

It shows illustrates the dependency between GDP, population, energy and emissions. Assuming we don't want to reduce population and GDP, we are left with optimizing energy and emission intensity.

I just finished this comic book by Jancovici which explains all this and it is very easy to read. https://www.amazon.com/World-Without-End-Blain-Christophe-eb...

I agree both Hertz and Accenture share some responsibility here. I didn't mean to blame it all on Hertz.

"They might have been better off building a team internally". For a business critical projects, building the team internally and using the right partner is the way to go imho... if budget allows, which they had plenty.

Here is my summary of the mistakes Hertz made: - hired the vendor based on a cool demo & vendor size - did not have a Hertz employee as Product Owner - tried to go big fast instead of taking an iterative approach - did not implement proper tests & validation - spent $10M without building internal skills

Disclaimer: I am totally bias here as I am consultant and our business model is to help our customers with their digital transformation while teaching them devops and cloud technology.

$10M for a project of this size and importance does not seem unreasonable to me. The big mistake is that they didn't seem to have a plan to take ownership of the project and learn the skills required to carry the project forward without Accenture.

What was the best finding in your experience?

The best way I know to find new routes in my city is to join a local strava club and see where others are running. If I travel, I rely on the Segment Explorer but I agree it is not perfect.

Alaska Airline has great craft beer from Alaska if that helps ;-)

I am curious to hear why the device you are looking for should be a compact and portable device. You listed it as your very first requirement so it must be a must-have.

When you initialize your HSM, a key is created which is owned by you and stored in a smartcard/token. If you buy an identical HSM, you shoud need the token to restore keys into it.

introduction: "we used a major vendor's HSM to protect our private keys"

conclusion: "The whole industry is shit."

You had a bad experience with one vendor, not with the industry.

There was a thread yesterday where lots of people were complaining about HSMs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13031155). I think this is an example where it would have helped to secure the private key in an HSM instead of the server itself.

Now the author states the keys have been rotated but now the next hacker know where to look.

I am not using an ad blocker but I still got that message... slowing performance and making my experience worse ;-(

I guess I got down voted because my statement is not popular? Or was it because I did not respect one of the YC News rule?

I made the same comment and I got downvoted as well. I don't vacri is saying it is bad to get the app from the Google App store. What is not enterprise ready is the Google Authenticator app itself. I use Google Authenticator for every consumer application which supports it, but it would be a mistake for an organization to use it to protect employee access to networks.

I stopped reading at "Google Authenticator". An app which scan a QR code which contains a clear text key is not enterprise-grade.