Comprehensive cloud sustainability assessment with embodied emissions

Embodied Emissions (or Scope 3 Emissions) are an important factor for organizations seeking to gain a detailed understanding of the carbon footprint associated with their IT infrastructure.

In an IT operations context, Scope 3 emissions refer to indirect emissions generated across the broader value chain of data centers and IT products, beyond their direct operation. These emissions are typically much more challenging to quantify.

In the latest version 48 of Txture, we have added Scope 3 emission estimates considering the hardware product lifecycle of cloud/datacenter infrastructure too.

This is a great addition to Txture's existing model, which already provides unified energy consumption and carbon emissions data across the main cloud providers, including AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. Txture's carbon emission model also spans compute and storage backed services, and even on-premises.

The model is now comprehensive to give estimations based on relevant factors like grid carbon intensity, server processor type and other hardware information, data center efficiency (PUE or DCiE), etc.

This is mainly built around the methods described in Cloud Carbon Footprint Project and led to extensions of cloud services data that we maintain in our knowledge base (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Txture Cloud Insider showing the new embodied carbon emissions data, by example for a compute node type driving AWS EKS.

Embodied emissions data is available in Txture through:

• Predefined reports in the Application Portfolio Advisor and Transformation Cockpit modules (see Figure 2)
• Properties for technical assets managed in the repository (see Figure 3)
• Distributed and aggregated values in technical and non-technical assets (e.g. Application level embodied emissions derived from emissions from underlying IT infrastructure)

Figure 2. Report in APA, as one example where embodied emissions are displayed per datacenter location.

Figure 3. Embodied emissions as separate properties per managed asset in Txture, contributing to the overall carbon footprint of it.

The addition of Scope 3 carbon emissions empowers organization to get a complete view of their IT-related carbon emissions, and to make more confident GreenOps decisions, in line with their sustainability goals.

Txture for sustainability in the cloud

Ready to track, analyze and optimize your IT carbon footprint across hybrid cloud environments with the Txture platform? Reach out to us, we'll be happy to help!