Methodology - DigitalPebble/carbonara GitHub Wiki

Carbonara uses third-party resources and models to estimate the environmental impact of cloud services. It enriches usage reports (CUR or FOCUS) with additional columns, allowing users to do greenops and build dashboards and reports.

Unlike the information provided by CSPs (Cloud Service Providers), Carbonara gives total transparency on how the estimates are built.

The overall approach is as follows:

1. Estimate the energy used per activity (e.g for X GB of data transferred, usage of an EC2 instance, storage etc...)
2. Add overheads (e.g. PUE, WUE)
3. Apply accurate carbon intensity factors - ideally for a specific location at a specific time
4. Where possible, estimate the embodied carbon related to the activity

This is compliant with the SCI specification from the GreenSoftware Foundation.

Enrichment modules

Carbonara generates the estimates above by chaining EnrichmentModules, each of them relying on columns found in the usage reports or produced by preceding modules.

For instance, the AverageCarbonIntensity.java module applies average carbon intensity factors to energy estimates based on the region in order to generate operational emissions.

The list of columns generated by the modules can be found in the Column class.