At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. We continue to grow our network, and it is important for us to do so responsibly.

Since Earth Day 2021, some pieces of this effort have included:

• Making a commitment to powering our network with 100% renewable energy

• Hosting our first Impact Week

• Releasing our first Impact Report and emissions inventory report

• Reducing the environmental impact of web searches via Crawler Hints

• Providing customers with visibility about their Scope 3 emissions with Carbon Impact Reports

And we are just getting started. We are working to make the Cloudflare network — and our customers’ websites, applications, and networks — as efficient as possible in terms of design, hardware, systems, and protocols. After all, we do not want to lose sight of our responsibilities to our home: our planet Earth.

During Impact Week last year, we began testing Green Compute in a closed beta. Green Compute makes Workers Cron Triggers run only in facilities that are powered by renewable energy. We are hoping to incentivize more facilities to implement responsible climate and energy policies.

With Green Compute enabled, Workers Cron Triggers will run only on Cloudflare points of presence that are located in data centers that are powered by 100% renewable energy.

Based on carbon accounting and renewable energy standards like RE100, all Cloudflare operations are considered 100% powered by renewable energy because we purchase the same amount of renewable energy as the total energy we use globally.

However, the data centers we operate in are co-located with facilities owned by other companies. Although our renewable energy purchases cover the energy used by our equipment, all other energy consumed at that facility may or may not be renewable.

Renewable energy can be purchased in a number of ways, including:

• Through on-site generation (wind turbines, solar panels)

• Directly from renewable energy producers through contractual agreements called Power Purchase Agreements (PPA)

• In the form of Renewable Energy Credits (RECs, IRECs, GoOs) from an energy credit market that helps offset energy use on-site

Today, we are happy to announce that we are bringing this function to all our developers — Green Compute is now in open beta. To get started, head to your Workers App, click Change Setting under Compute Setting, and select Green Compute.

Now, any time you create a scheduled workload, you will see a leaf icon indicating that your schedules will be run in data centers powered by renewable energy sources. With just one click, you can help build a better Internet.

• Want to get more involved with the Cloudflare Developer community, help shape what we build next, or give feedback on Green Compute? Enter our Discord and join the conversation.

• Learn more about how Cloudflare is helping build a better Internet via Cloudflare Impact.

Over the past few days, as part of Cloudflare’s Impact Week, we’ve written about the work we’re doing to help build a greener Internet. We’re making bold climate commitments for our own network and facilities and introducing new capabilities that help customers understand and reduce their impact. And in addition to organization-level initiatives, we also recognize the importance of individual impact — which is why we’re excited to publicly introduce Greencloud, our sustainability-focused employee working group.

Greencloud is a coalition of Cloudflare employees who are passionate about the environment. Initially founded in 2019, we’re a cross-functional, global team with a few areas of focus:

1. Awareness: Greencloud compiles and shares resources about environmental activism with each other and the broader organization. We believe that collective action — not just conscious consumerism, but also engagement in local policy and community movements — is critical to a more sustainable future, and that the ability to affect change starts with education. We’re also consistently inspired by the great work other folks in tech are doing in this space, and love sharing updates from peers that push us to do better within our own spheres of influence.

2. Support: Our membership includes Cloudflare team members from across the org chart, which enables us to be helpful in supporting multidisciplinary projects led by functional teams within Cloudflare.

3. Advocacy: We recognize the importance of both individual and organization-level action. We continue to challenge ourselves, each other and the broader organization to think about environmental impact in every decision we make as a company.

Our vision is to contribute on every level to addressing the climate crisis and creating a more sustainable future, helping Cloudflare become a clear leader in sustainable practices among tech companies. Moreover, we want to empower our colleagues to make more sustainable decisions in each of our individual lives.

Since launching in 2019, Greencloud has created a space for conversation and idea generation around Cloudflare’s sustainability initiatives, many of which have been implemented across our organization. As a group, we’ve created content to educate ourselves and external audiences about a broad range of sustainability topics:

• Benchmarked Cloudflare’s sustainability practices against peer companies to understand our baseline and source ideas for improvement.

• Curated guides for colleagues on peer-reviewed content, product recommendations, and “low-hanging fruit” actions we all have the ability to take, such as choosing a sustainable 401k investment plan and using a paperless option for all employee documents.

• Hosted events such as sustainability-themed trivia/quiz nights to spark discussion and teach participants techniques for making more sustainable decisions in our own homes and lives.

In addition to creating “evergreen” resources and hosting events, Greencloud threw a special celebration for April 22, 2021 — the 51st global Earth Day. For the surrounding week, we hosted a series of events to engage our employees and community in sustainability education and actions.

You can catch reruns of our Earth Week content on Cloudflare TV, covering a broad range of topics:

Tuesday: InfrastructureA chat with Michael Aylward, Head of Cloudflare's Network Partners Program and renewable energy expert, about the carbon footprint of Internet infrastructure. We explored how the Internet contributes to climate change and what tech companies, including Cloudflare, are doing to minimize this footprint.

Wednesday: PolicyAn interview with Doug Kramer, Cloudflare's General Counsel, and Patrick Day, Cloudflare's Senior Policy Counsel, on the overlap between sustainability, tech, and public policy. We dove into how tech companies, including Cloudflare, are working with policymakers to build a more sustainable future.

Thursday: Cloudflare and the ClimateFrancisco Ponce de León interviewed Sagar Aryal, the CTO of Plant for the Planet, an organization of young Climate Justice Ambassadors with the goal of planting one trillion trees. Plant for the Planet is a participant in Project Galileo, Cloudflare's program providing free protection for at-risk public interest groups.

In addition, Amy Bibeau, our Greencloud Places team lead, interviewed Cloudflare's Head Of Real Estate and Workplace Operations, Caroline Quick and LinkedIn's Dana Jennings, Senior Project Manager, Global Sustainability for a look into the opportunities and challenges around creating sustainable workplaces. Like most companies, Cloudflare is re-thinking what our workplace will look like post-COVID.  Baking sustainability into those plans, and being a model for other companies, can be game changing.

Friday: Personal Impact & TriviaA panel of Greencloud employees addressed the challenge of personal versus collective/system-level action and broke down some of the highest value actions we’re working on taking in our own lives.

Finally, Greencloud took over Cloudflare TV’s signature game show Silicon Valley Squares with Earth Day-themed questions!

No one person, group, or organization working alone can save our planet — the degree of collective action required to reverse climate change is staggering, but we’re excited and inspired by the work that leaders across every industry are pitching in every day. We’d love for you and/or your organization to join us in this calling to create a more sustainable planet and tell us about your initiatives to exchange ideas.

Power is the precursor to all modern technology. James Watt’s steam engine energized the factory, Edison and Tesla’s inventions powered street lamps, and now both fossil fuels and renewable resources power the trillions of transistors in computers and phones. In the words of anthropologist Leslie White: “Other things being equal, the degree of cultural development varies directly as the amount of energy per capita per year harnessed and put to work.”

Unfortunately, most of the traditional ways to generate power are simply not sustainable. Burning coal or natural gas releases carbon dioxide which directly leads to global warming, and threatens the habitats of global ecosystems, and by extension humans. If we can’t minimize the impact, our world will be dangerously destabilized -- mass extinctions will grow more likely, and mass famines, draughts, migration, and conflict will only be possible to triage rather than avoid.

Is the Internet the primary source of this grave threat? No: all data centers globally accounted for 2-3% of total global power use in recent years, and power consumption isn’t the only contributor to human carbon emissions. Transportation (mostly oil use in cars, trucks, ships, trains, and airplanes) and industrial processing (steel, chemicals, heavy manufacturing, etc.) also account for similar volumes of carbon emissions. Within power use though, some internet industry analysts estimate that total data center energy (in kilowatt-hours, not percentage of global power consumption) may double every four years for the foreseeable future -- making internet energy use more than just rearranging deck chairs...

How does internet infrastructure like Cloudflare’s contribute to power consumption? Computing power resources are split into end users (like your phone or computer displaying this page) and network infrastructure. That infrastructure likewise splits into “network services” like content delivery and “compute services” like database queries. Cloudflare offers both types of services, and has a sustainability impact in both -- this post describes how we think about it.

The Cloudflare Network has one huge advantage when power is considered. We run a homogeneous network of nearly identical machines around the world, all running the same code on similar hardware. The same servers respond to CDN requests, block massive DDoS attacks, execute customer code in the form of Workers, and even serve DNS requests to 1.1.1.1. When it is necessary to bring more capacity to a problem we are able to do it by adjusting our traffic’s routing through the Internet, not by requiring wasteful levels of capacity overhead in 175 locations around the world. Those factors combine to dramatically reduce the amount of waste, as they mean we don’t have large amounts of hardware sitting idle consuming energy without doing meaningful work. According to one study servers within one public cloud average 4.15% to 16.6% CPU utilization, while Cloudflare’s edge operates significantly higher than that top-end.

One of the functions Cloudflare performs for our customers is caching, where we remember previous responses our customers have given to requests. This allows the edge location closest to the visitor to respond to requests instantly, saving the request a trip through the Internet to the customer’s origin server. This immediately saves energy, as sending data through the Internet requires switches and routers to make decisions which consumes power.

Serving a response from cache is as close to the lowest power requirement you can imagine to serve a web request; we are reading data from memory or disk and immediately returning it. In contrast, when a customer’s origin has to serve a request, there are two additional costs Cloudflare avoids: first, even getting the request to arrive at the origin often requires many hops over the Internet, each requiring CPU cycles and the energy they consume. Second, the request often requires large amounts of code to be executed and even database queries to be run. The savings are so great that we often have customers enable our caching to keep their servers running even when their request volume would overwhelm their capacity; if our caching were disabled they would almost immediately fail. This means we are not only saving CPU cycles on our customer’s origin, we are preventing them from having to buy and run multiple-X more servers with the proportionally greater energy use & environmental impact that entails.

Our breadth on the Internet also means the performance optimizations we are able to perform have a disproportionate impact. When we speed up TLS or fix CPU stalls we are shaving off milliseconds of CPU from requests traveling to 13 million different websites. It would be virtually impossible to get all of these performance improvements integrated into every one of those origins, but with Cloudflare they simply see fewer requests and energy is saved.

The energy efficiency of using a wax or tallow candle to create light is on the order of 0.01%. A modern power plant burning gas to power an LED light bulb is nearly 10% efficient, an improvement of 1,000x. One of the most powerful things we can do to lower energy consumption, therefore, is to give people ways of performing the same work with less energy.

Our connection to this concept lives not just in our network, but in the serverless computing platform we offer atop it, Cloudflare Workers. Many of the conventions that govern how modern servers and services operate descend directly from the mainframe era of computing, where a single large machine would run a single job. Unlike other platforms which are based on that legacy, we don’t sell customers servers, virtual machines, or containers; instead we use a technology called isolates. Isolates represent a lightweight way to run a piece of code which provides much of the same security guarantees with less overhead, allowing many thousands of different customer’s code to be executed on a small number of machines efficiently. A traditional computer system might be just as efficient running a single program, but as our world shifts into serverless computing with thousands of code files running on a single machine, isolates shine.

In a conventional computer system the complex security dance between the operating system and the code being executed by a user can consume as much as 30% of the CPU power used. This has only gotten worse with the recent patches required to prevent speculative execution vulnerabilities. Isolates share a single runtime which can manage the security isolation required to run many thousands of customer scripts, without falling back to the operating system. We are able to simply eliminate much of that 30% overhead, using that capacity to execute useful code instead.

Additionally, by being able to start our isolates using just a few milliseconds of CPU time rather than the hundreds required by conventional processes we are able to dynamically scale rapidly, more efficiently using the hardware we do have. Isolates allow us to spend CPU cycles on only the code customers actually wish to execute, not wasteful overhead. These effects are in fact so dramatic that we have begun to rebuild parts of our own internal infrastructure as isolate-powered Cloudflare Workers in part to save energy for ourselves and our customers.

All that means that the energy we ultimately do use for our operations is only a fraction of what it would otherwise take to accomplish the same tasks.

Last year, we took our first major step toward neutralizing the remaining carbon footprint from our operations by purchasing Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) to match all of our electricity use in North America. This year, we have expanded our scope to include all of our operations around the world.

We currently have 175 data centers in more than 75 countries around the world, as well as 11 offices in San Francisco (our global HQ) London, Singapore, New York, Austin, San Jose, Champaign, Washington, D.C. Beijing, Sydney, and Munich. In order to reduce our carbon footprint, we have purchased RECs to match 100% of the power used in all those data centers and offices around the world as well.

As our colleague Jess Bailey wrote about last year, one REC is created for every Megawatt-hour (MWh) of electricity generated from a renewable power source, like a wind turbine or solar panel. Renewable energy is dispersed into electricity transmission systems similar to how water flows in water distribution systems — each of them is mixed inextricably in its respective “pipes” and it’s not possible to track where any particular electron you use, or drop of water you drink, originally came from. RECs are a way to track the volume (and source) of renewable energy contributed to the grid, and act like a receipt for each MWh contributed.

As we noted last year, this action is an important part of our sustainability plan, joining our efforts to work with data centers that have superior Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), and adding to the waste diversion and energy efficiency efforts we already employ in all of our offices.

When combined with our ability to dramatically reduce the amount of data which has to flow through the Internet and the number of requests which have to reach our customer’s origins we hope to not just be considered neutral, but to have a large-scale and long-term positive effect on the sustainability of the Internet itself.