Screaming in the Cloud - Saving the World through Cloud Sustainability with Aerin Booth

Episode Date: January 26, 2023

About AerinAerin is a Cloud Sustainability Advocate and neurodiverse founder in tech on a mission to help developers understand the real impact that cloud computing has on the world and reduce their carbon emissions in the cloud. Did you know that internet and cloud computing contribute over 4% of annual carbon emissions? Twice that of the airline industry!Aerin also hosts "Public Cloud for Public Good," a podcast targeted towards developers and senior leaders in tech. Every episode, they also donate £500 to charities and highlight organisations that are working towards a better future. Listen and learn how you can contribute towards making the world a better place through the use of public cloud services.Links Referenced:Twitter: https://twitter.com/aerincloudLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aerinb/Public Cloud for Public Good: https://publicgood.cloud/duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com

Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud. This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Optics, because they believe that many of you are looking to bolster your security posture with CNAP and XDR solutions.

They offer both cloud and endpoint security in a single UI and data model. Listeners can get Optics for up to 1,000 assets through the end of 2023, that is next year, for $1. But this offer is only available for a limited time on OpticsSecretMenu.com. That's U-P-T-Y-C-S SecretMenu.com. Cloud Native just means you've got more components or microservices than anyone, even a mythical TEDx engineer, can keep track of. With Ops Level, you can build a catalog in minutes and forget needing that mythical TEDx engineer.

Now, you'll have a TEDx service catalog to accompany your 10x service count. Visit OpsLevel.com to learn how easy it is to build and manage your service catalog. Connect to your Git provider and you're off to the races with service import, repo ownership, tech docs, and more. Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. And I am joined, what feels like roughly a year later by a returning guest aaron booth how have you been i've been really great you know it's been a journey of a year i think since we sort of did this podcast even like you know a year and a bit since we met and like doing so much and i think it's doing like a big difference and yeah, I can't wait

for everything else. It's just, yeah, a lot of work right now, but I'm really enjoying it. So I'm really well, thank you. Normally I like to introduce people by giving their job title and the company at which they work, because again, that's a big deal for an awful lot of people. But a year ago you were independent and now you still are. And back when I was doing my own consulting independently, it felt very weird to do that. So I'm just going to call you the Ted Lasso of cloud at this point. You've got the mustache. You've got the, I would say, obnoxiously sunny disposition. It's really, there's a certain affinity right there.

So there we go. I feel like that is the best descriptor for what you have become. Do you know what? I only just watched Ted Lasso over Christmas, and I really found it so motivational in some ways because, wow, isn't that just who we'd want to be in a lot of ways? And I think for the work that I do, which is focused on sustainability, I want to present a positive future.

I want to encourage people to achieve more and collaborate and, yeah, basically work on all these problems that we need to be worked on and yeah I think that's one of the challenges of talking to you sometimes is you talk about these depressing things but there's such a you take such an upbeat positive approach to it that I by comparison invariably come away from our conversations feeling like I'm Surly McBastard over here. Yeah, you can be the bad cop of cloud computing and I'll try and be the good cop. Do you know, you say that the stuff I talk about is depressing and it is true. And people do worry about climate change. Like I did an online conference recently, it was focused on FinOps and we had a survey, do you worry about climate change? 70% of the people that responded said they worry about it. So we all know it's something we worry about and we care about and you know i guess what i'm really trying

to do is encourage people to care a bit more and start taking action and look after yourself because you know when you do start taking action towards when you join those communities that are also working on it it is good it is helpful and you know i've gone through some ups and downs in some of this. Like, just do I throw in the towel because no one cares about it? Like, we spoke last year. I'd attended reInvent for the first time. But this year, I was able to speak at reInvent.

So I did a talk on being ethical in tech. And it was fun. It was good. I enjoyed what I delivered. But I had about 35 people sign up to that. I'm pretty sure if I talked about serverless or the next web free blockchain product i would have got hundreds more but and what i'm starting to realize is that i think people just aren't ready to sort of want to do this yet and yeah i'm hoping that'll change let's first talk about i guess something that is more temporally pressing

than some other things. Not that it is more important than climate change, mind you, but it feels like it's on a shorter timeline, which is relatively soon after this recording, there is a conference that you are kicking off called the State of Open. Ajar, Aaron. The State of Open is ajar. What is this conference? Is it in person? Is it virtual? Is it something where you and three friends are going to show up and basically talk to each other? How big? How small? What is it?

What's it about? Tell me more. Please. I'm riveted. So State of Open Conference is a conference that's been in the works now for about maybe about two weeks. A little bit longer in the planning, but the work we've been putting in over the last two weeks. It'll be on the 7th and 8th of February in London as a physical event in the QE2 conference center, but it'll also be available online. And when we talk about the state of open, it's that question, what is the state of open? The state of open source, the state of open hardware,

and the state of open data. And it is going to be probably the first and hopefully the biggest open source conference in the UK. We already have over 100 confirmed guest speakers from Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, to many other great guests and headliners who we haven't even announced yet for the plenaries. So I'm really excited. And the reason why I wanted to get involved with this is because one of the coolest things about this conference, compared to some others like reInvent, for example, is that sustainability and diversity run through every single thing that we do. So as the content director, I reviewed every single CFP for both these things. I mean, you couldn't get a better person than someone like me, who's the queer person who won't shut up about sustainability to sort of do this thing so you know i looked after those scorings for the cfps and supported the cfp chairs and now

as i'm working with those individual speakers on their content and making sure that diversity is included in the content it's not just the diversity of the speaker for example it's who were the other people whose voice you're raising what other people have you worked on this are there anyone that you've mentored like Like, you know, actually, let's have this as a wider conversation. Thank God. I thought you were about to say diversity of thought

and I was about to reach you the screen to strangle you. No, no. I mean, we're doing really well. So of the announced speakers online, we have 40% non-male and about 18% non-white, which to be honest,

for a first year conference, and we didn't really do that much to specifically call this out, but I would probably raise this to Amanda Brock, who is the CEO of Open UK. She has built a community in the UK and around the world over the last few years, which has been putting women forward and building these links.

And that's why we've had such a great response for our first-year conferences, the work she's put in. It's hard. This isn't easy. We've had to a great response for our first year conferences. The work she's put in, it's hard. Like this isn't easy. You know, we've had to do a lot of work to make sure that it is representative, at least better than other conferences at least. So I'm really excited.

And like there's so much like open source is probably going to be the thing that saves the world. If we're going to end up looking at two different futures with monopolies and closed systems and all the money going towards cloud providers versus a fair and equitable society. Open source is the thing that's going to get us closer to that. So, yeah, this conference will be a great event.

Is it all in person? Is it being live streamed as well? What is the deal here? So, in person, we have loads of different things going on, but what will be streamed online, if you sign up for a virtual ticket, is different tracks so our platform engineering track our security track government law and policy open data and open hardware and of course the keynote and plenaries but one of the things i'm also really proud about this conference is that we're really focusing on the developer experience like you know what is your experience at the conference so we also have

an unconference we have have a sub-conference run by SustainOS focused on workshops related to climate change and sustainability. We have loads of developer experience halls in the event itself. And throughout the day, over the two days, we have two one-hour blocks with no speaking content at all so that we can really make sure that people have that hardware track and are out there meeting each other and having a good time. And obviously, of course, like any good conference, the all-hands party on the first night. So it really is a conference that's doing things differently from diversity to sustainability to that experience. So it's awesome.

One of the challenges that I've seen historically around things aiming at the idea of open conferences, when we talk open source, et cetera, et cetera, open seems like it is a direct parallel to we haven't any money. Where it's, yes, we're a free software foundation, and it turns out conferences themselves are not free. And you wind up with a whole bunch of folks showing up to it who are, in many cases, around the fringes of things. They're individual hobbyists who are very passionate about a thing but do not have the position in the corporate world. I'm looking through the lengthy list of speakers you have here and that is very much not this. These are serious people at serious companies. Not that there are not folks who are individual practitioners and passionate advocates and hobbyists and the rest. This is, by virtually any way you look at it, a remarkably diverse conference.

You know, you are right about that problem in open source. It's like, you know, we look at open and whether we want to do open and we just go, well, it won't make me any money. I can't do that. I don't have the time. I need to bring in some money. And one of the really unique things, again, about this conference is I have not even mentioned it yet. We have an entrepreneurship room. So we have 20 tables filled with entrepreneurs and CEOs and founders of open source companies throughout the two days where you can book in time to sit at that table and have conversations with them. Ask them the questions that you want to ask about whether it's something that you want to work on

or a company you want to found, and you'll be able to get that time. I had a very similar experience. In some ways, it was reinvent. I was a peer talk expert. And you know, I had 15 or so conversations with some really interesting people just because they were able to put that time in

and they were able to find me on the website. So that's something we are replicating to get those 20 or so entrepreneurs and CEO founders out to everyone else. They want to be able to help you and support you. That is an excellent segue, if I do say so myself. Let's talk about reinvent. It's the one time of the year you and I get to spend time in the same room. One thing that I got wrong is that I overbooked myself, as I often do, and I didn't have time to do anything on their PeerTalk expert program, which is more or less a way that any rando can book time to sit down and chat with you. Now, in my case, I have assassination concerns because it turns out Amazon employees can read that thing too, and some of them might work on billing.

What wonders? So yeah, I have to be a little careful for personal reasons, but for most people, it's a non-issue. I didn't get as much time as I wanted to talk to folks in the community, and that is not going to repeat itself at the end of this year. But what was your take on reInvent? Because I was in meetings for most of them. So comparing this reInvent to the reInvent I went to, my first reInvent when we met in 2021, that was the reInvent that inspired me to get into sustainability. They'd announced stuff to do with the shared responsibility model. A few months later, they'd released their carbon calculator. And I was like, yeah, this is the problem. This is the thing I want to work on, and it will make me happy. And a lot of that goes into, you know, finding a passion that keeps me

motivated when things aren't that great, when maybe not a lot of money's coming in. At least I know I'm doing everything I can to help save the world. So Reinvent 2021 really inspired me to get involved with sustainability. When I look at Reinvent 2022, you might have Adam Selepski on the main stage saying that sustainability is the problem of our generation, but that is just talk and bluster compared to what they were putting out in terms of content and their experience of like let's say their sustainability I don't know what to call it tiny little square in the back of the MGM grand compared to the paid hall in the expo like you know that's the sort of thing where you can already see the

prioritization of money like put the the biggest sponsors and all the money that we kind of bring it in in the big hall where everyone is and then put the thing we care about the most apparently sustainability in the back of the MGM. And that in itself was annoying, but then you get there and the content and it was like a massive Rivian van, like an advert for, oh, Amazon's done all this to electrify Rivian and deliver you Prime.

But where was the people working on sustainability in the cloud? You know, we had a couple of teams who were talking about the customer carbon footprint tool, but there was just not much. And I spoke to a lot of people and they were saying similar things like, where are the announcements? Where are the actual interesting things?

Rather than just, which is kind of what I'm starting to realize is that a lot of the conversations about sustainability is about selling yourself as sustainable. Use me rather than my competitors because we're 88% more kind of carbon neutral when it comes to traditional data centers, not because we are really going to solve these problems. And not to say that Amazon isn't doing innovative, amazing things that no one else can't do because that is true and cloud is part of the solution.

But, you know, sustainability shouldn't be about making more sales and growing your business. It should be about making the world a better place, not just in terms of carbon emissions, but our life, the tech that we can access. Three billion people on this planet have never accessed the internet. And as we continue to grow all of our services like AI and machine learning and new web-free bloody managed services come online, that's going to be more carbon, more compute power going towards the already rich and the already westernized people rather than solving the problems we need to solve in the face of climate change. So I was a little bit disappointed. And I did put a tweet thread

out about it afterwards. And I just hope it can be different next year. And I hope more people will start to ask for this. And that's also what I'm starting to realize is that until more Amazon customers put this as their number one priority and say, I'm not going to do business with you because of this issue or this is what we really care about, they're not going to make a change. Unless it starts to impact their bottom lines

and people start to choose other cloud providers, they're not going to prioritize it. And I think up until this point, we're not seeing that from customers. We're kind of getting some people like me shouting about it, but across the board, sustainability isn't the number one priority right now. It's like what Amazon says, security or resiliency or something else. I think that at least from where I sit, the challenge is, is that if you ask me what I got out of reInvent and what the conversations I had

with going into it, what are my expectations and what do I hope to get and how is it going to end up? And then you ask you that same question. Well, maybe you are a poor example of this. And then you ask someone who works as an engineer at a company that uses AWS and they're two or three years into their career. And then you talk to a manager or director or someone else. And the problem is, is if you start polling the entire audience, you'll find that this becomes, you get rid of collecting 20 different answers, at least. The conference doesn't seem like it has any idea of what it wants to be and to whom. And in that vacuum, it tries to be all things to all people. And surprise, just like the shitty

multifunction printer some of us have in our homes, it doesn't do well in any of those things because it's trying to stand in too many worlds at the same time. You know, let's not look at this from a way that reinvent is crap and all the work that everyone puts in is wasted because it is a really great event for a lot of different things, for a lot of different people.

And to be honest, the work that the Amazon staff put into it is pretty out of this world. I feel sorry though because you know at the rush for aws to sell more and do this massive event they put people through the grinder and i feel like i don't know if you could see the cracks in in some of that the way that that works but yeah you know there's so many people that i speak to who are like yeah i'm definitely not going again i'm not even going to go anywhere near submitting a talk and it's all

the thing is like you know imagine if the conference was something different it was focused at sustainability at number one it was about making the world a better place from everything that they do it was about bringing diverse communities together like you know bringing these things up the list would make the whole thing a lot better and to be honest it'd probably make it a lot more enjoyable for the amazon staff who who end up talking at it because you know i guess it can feel a bit soulless over time is all you're doing is making money for someone else and selling more things.

And yeah, I think there's a lot more different things we can do and a lot more things we can talk about if people just start to talk about it. Like, you know, if you care about this as well, and you work at Amazon, then start saying that as well. You know, it'll really make a difference if you say, we want reInvent to look different. I mean, even Amazon staff, and we've not even mentioned this one,

because I got COVID straight after reInvent, nine days, and staring at a wall in a hotel room in Vegas was not my idea of a good time post-conference. So that was a horrible, horrible experience. But I've had people call it reInfect. Like, where are the COVID supports? There was hardly any conversation about that it was sort of like don't mention it because oh whatever else but imagine if you just did something a little bit differently to you know look like you care about your customers just say we recommend people mask or take a test

or even provide tests and masks like even if it's not mandatory they could have done a lot more to make it safer for everyone. Because, yeah, imagine having the reputation of reinfect rather than reinvent. I can only imagine how that would play out. Only imagine. Yeah, it's because we're all collectively decided to pretend that the pandemic is over. Because, yeah, that's a bummer. I don't want to think about, you know, kind of like we approach climate change.

At the end of the day, like, and I keep coming across this more and more, and my thinking's changed over the last year. Because, you know, initially it was like a hyperactive puppy. Why aren't we caring about this? Like, yeah, if I say it,

people will come. But the reality is we have to blinker ourselves in order to deal with a lot of this stuff. We can't always worry about all of this stuff all of the time.

And that's fine. That's acceptable. We do that in so many different parts of our life. But there comes to a point when you kind of think, how much do I care about this? And for a lot of people, it's because they have kids. Like anyone who has kids right now must have to think, wow, what's the future going to look like? And if you worry about what the future is going to look like, make sure you're taking steps to make the world a better place and make it the future you want it to look like. You know, I made the decision a long time ago

not to have kids because I don't think I'd want to bring anyone into the world and what it might actually end up being. But, you know, when I speak to people who are older in their 60s and they're like, oh, you've got 100 years, you don't need to worry about it.

Like, maybe you can say that because you're closer to dying than I am. But yeah, I have to worry about this now because I'll still be 80 when all this shit's kicking off. This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Strata. Are you struggling to keep up with the demands of managing and securing identity in your distributed enterprise IT environment? You're not alone, but you shouldn't let that hold you back. With Strata's Identity Orchestration Platform, you can secure all your apps on any cloud with any IDP, so your IT teams will never have to refactor for identity again. Imagine modernizing app identity in minutes instead of months, deploying passwordless on any tricky old app, and achieving business resilience with always-on

identity, all from one lightweight and flexible platform. Want to see it in action? Share your identity challenge with them on a discovery call, and they'll hook you up with a complimentary pair of AirPods Pro. Don't miss out. Visit strata.io slash screamingcloud. That's strata.io slash screamingcloud. That, I guess, is one of the big fears I have, and I think is somewhat unfounded, is that every year starts to look too much like the year before it, because it's one of those ideas where we start to see the pace of innovation is slowing at AWS. And I'm not saying that to piss people at Amazon off and have them come after me with the pitchforks and torches again.

But they're not launching new services at the rate they once did, which is good for customers. But it starts to feel like, oh, have we hit peak cloud? This is what it's going to look like. Absolutely not. I don't get the sense that the world is like, well, everything's been invented. Time to shut down the patent office anytime soon. And in the short term, it feels like, oh, there's not a lot of exciting going on.

But you look back at the last five years, even, and look at how far we've come even in that period of time, and what is it, the days are long, but the years are short? It becomes a very macro thing of, as things ebb and flow, you start to see the differences, but on the micro basis, on a year-to-year perspective, it seems harder to detect. So longer term, I think we're going to see what the story looks like. And it's going to be a satisfying one. Just right now, it's like, well, this wasn't as entertaining as I would have hoped, so I'm annoyed, which I am because it wasn't. But that's not the biggest problem in the world. It's not. And you look at, okay, cool, there wasn't all these new flashy services. There

was a few things that were announced, I mean, hopefully that are going to contribute towards climate change. One of them is called AWS Supply Chain. And the irony of seeing something like AWS Supply Chain, where a company that already has issues with data and conversations around competition, saying to everyone, hey, trust us and give you all of your supply chain information and put it into one of our AWS products, when at the same time, their customer carbon footprint tool won't even show the full scope-free emissions of their own supply chain is not lost on me. And you do say, maybe we should start seeing things at a macro

level, but unless Amazon and other cloud hyperscalers start pulling the finger out and showing us how they have got a vision between now and 2040 and now and 2050 of how they're going to get there, it kind of just feels like they're saying it'll all be fine as long as we continue to grow, as long as we keep sucking up the market. And an interesting thing that just kicked off in the UK back in November was the Competition Markets Authority have started an investigation into the cloud providers on how they are basically sucking up all these markets and how the growth of things that are not hyperscale is going. So in the UK, the percentage of cloud has obviously gone up. More and more cloud spending has gone up, but kind of usage

across non-hyperscalers has gone down over that same period. And they really are at risk of sucking up the world. I've got involved in a lot of different things. I'm an AWS community builder. I do promote AWS. And the reason why I promote cloud, for example lot of different things. I'm an AWS community builder. I do promote AWS. And the reason why I promote cloud, for example, is serverless. We need serverless as the way we run our IT because that's the only way we'll do things like time shifting or demand shifting. So when we look at renewable energy on the grid, if that's really high, the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, we want more workloads to be running then.

And when they're tiny and they're, you know, code and, what do they call it, serverless generally? Hype? Function as a code. Yeah, function as a service and all kinds of other nonsense.

But I have to ask, when you're talking about serverless in this context, is a necessary prerequisite of serverless that it's scaled to zero when it's idle? Again, it comes back to marketing.

What's Amazon releasing these days when it relates to serverless that isn't just marketing and saying, ooh, it's server. Again, it comes back to marketing. What's Amazon releasing these days when it relates to serverless? It isn't just marketing and saying, oh, it's serverless. Because yeah, there was a few products this year that is not scaled to zero. It's a hundred pound minimum. And when you're looking at number of accounts that you have, that can add up really quickly and it excludes people from using it. It's worse than that because it's not

number of accounts. I consider DynamoDB to be serverless by any definition of the term, because it is. And what I like about it is I can have a separate table for every developer, for every service or microservice or project that they have. And in fact, each branch can have its own stuff like that. I look at some of the stuff that I build with multi-branch testing and whatnot, and oh, wow, that would cost more than the engineer if they were to do that with some of the serverless offerings that AWS has put out, which makes that entire philosophy a complete

non-starter, which means that invariably, as soon as you start developing down that path, you are making significant trade-offs. That's just from a economic slash developer ergonomic slash best practices point of view, but there's a sustainability story to it as well. Yeah, I mean, the sustainability thing is like, if you're not going to encourage this new way of working, like if you're not going to move everyone to this point of view, and this is how we need to do things, then you're kind of just propagating the old world,

putting it into your data center for every managed service that a VMware migrated piece of crap just that lands in the cloud, it's not making a real difference in the world because that's still going to exist. And we mentioned this just before the podcast. And, you know, a lot of focus these days and for a lot of people is, okay, green energy is the problem. We need to solve green energy. And Amazon is the biggest purchaser of power purchase agreements

and renewable energy around the world, more than most governments. I think they're the biggest corporate purchaser of power purchase agreements and renewable energy around the world, more than most governments. I think they're the biggest corporate purchaser of it anyway. And that all might sound great, like, oh, the cloud's going to solve this problem for me, and Amazon's going to solve it for me even better because they're bigger. But at the end of the day, when we think about a data center, it exists in the real world. It's made of concrete. When you pour concrete and when you make concrete, it releases CO2. It's got racks of servers that all are running. So those individual servers have to be made by whoever it is in Asia or mined from rare earth metals and end up in the supply chain and then transported into the data centers in US East 1. And then things go wrong. You have to repair,

you have to replace, and you have to maintain them. Unless we get these circular economies going in a closed system, we can't just continue to grow like this because carbon emissions related to scope free, all those things I've just been talking about, basically anything that isn't the energy is about 80 to 90% of all the carbon emissions. So when Amazon says, oh, we're going to go green and get energy done by 2030, which is about seven years away, they've then got 10 years to solve 90% of the problem. And we cannot all just continue to grow and think of tech as neutral and better for the world if we've still got that 90% problem, which we do right now. And it really frustrates me when you look at the world and the way we've jumped on technology, just going, oh, it must be good. Like Bitcoin, for example. Bitcoin has released 200 million metric tons of CO2 since its inception. And for something that is basically a glorified Ponzi scheme, I can't see how that is making the world a better place. So when cloud providers are making managed services for web-free and for

blockchain, and they're selling more and more AI and machine learning, basically, so they can keep on selling GPU access. I do worry about whether our path to infinite growth with all of these hyperscalers is probably the wrong way of looking at things. So linking back to the conference, open source and thinking about things differently is really important in tech right now. And not just for your own well-being and being able to sleep at night, but this is how we're going to solve our problems. When all companies on the planet want people to be sustainable, and we have to start tackling this because there's a financial cost related to it, then you're going to be in the vogue. If you're

a really good developer, thinking about things differently can be efficient, then yeah, you're the developer that's going to win in the future. You might be assisted by ChatGPT3 or whatever else, but yeah, sustainability and efficiency can really be the number one priority because it's a win-win-win. We save the world, we make ourselves better, we sleep better at night and you just become a better developer.

I keep monologuing at this point, but when it comes to stuff like games design, we look at things like Quake and Pokemon and all these things where it's like, how did they get these amazing games and these amazing experiences in such small sizes? They had boundaries. They had boundaries to innovate within because they had to. They couldn't release the game if they couldn't fit into the cartridge.

Therefore, they made it work. When the cloud is sold as infinitely scalable and horizontally scalable and no one needs to worry about this stuff because you can get your credit card out, people stop caring about being innovative and being more efficient. So yeah, let's get some more boundaries in the cloud. What I find that is super helpful

has been like, if I can like describe, like Instagram is down, describe your lunch to me style meme description, like the epic handshake where you have two people clasping hands. And one side's labeled, in this case, sustainability advocates. And the other side should be labeled cloud economists. And in the middle, it's turn that shit off, because it's not burning carbon if it's not running. And it's not costing you anything,

ideally, if it's not running. So it's one of those ideas where we meet in the middle. And that's important, not just because it makes both of us independently happy, because it's both good for the world, and you'll get companies on board with this because, wait, we can do this thing and it saves us money? Suddenly, you're getting them aligned because that is their religion. If companies could be said to have a religion, it is money. That's the way it works. So you have to make it worth money for them to do the right thing, or you're always going to be swimming upstream like a depressed salmon. I mean, look, why do you think security is near the top? Because there's so many big fines related to security breaches, it'll cost them money not to

be secure. Right now, it doesn't cost companies money to be inefficient or to release all this carbon, so they get away with it or they choose to do it. And I think that's going to change. We see in regulations across Europe coming out. So if you work for a big multinational that operates in Europe, by next year, you'll have to report on all of your scope-free carbon emissions. If you're a customer of AWS right now, you have no ability to do that. So this is going to be crunch time over the next 18 months

to two years for a lot of big businesses, for Amazon and the other hyperscalers to really start demonstrating they can do this. And I guess that's my big push. And, you know, I want to work with anyone. And it's funny because I have been running this business for about a couple of years now. It's been going really well. I did my podcast. I'm on this path. But I did last year take some time and I applied into AWS. And I was like, okay, maybe I'll apply for this big tech company and help Amazon out

because I'll take that salary and I'll do something really good with it afterwards. I'll do my time for three years and attend, reinvent, and deliver 12 talks and never sleep. But at the end of it, I'll say, okay, I've done that and now I can do something really good. Unfortunately, I didn't get the role, fortunately. But when I applied for that role, what I said to them is I really care about

sustainability. I want to make the world a better place. I want to help your customers be more sustainable. And they didn't want me to join. So I'm just going to continue doing that, but from the outside. And whether that means working with politicians or developers or anyone else to try and make the world better and to kind of help fight against climate change, then, yeah, that's definitely what I'm doing. So, a last question before we wind up calling it an episode. How do we get there? What is the best next step that folks can take? Because it's easy to look at this as a grand problem and realize it's too big to solve. Well, great. You don't need to solve the entire problem. You need

to take the first step. What is that first step? For individuals, I would say it's just realizing that you do care about it and you want to take action. And you're going to say to yourself, even if I do little things, I'm going to move forward towards that point. So if that is being a more sustainable engineer or getting more conversations about climate change or even just doing other things in your community to make the world a better place than it is taking that action.

But one thing that I can definitely help about and talk a bit more of is that at the conference itself, I'll be running a panel with some great experts called the Next Generation of Cloud Education. So I really think we need to, like I said earlier in the podcast, think differently about the cloud and IT. So I am doing this panel and I'm bringing together someone like Simon Wardley to help people do Wardley mapping. That is a tool that allows you

to see the landscape that you're operating in. If you use that sort of tool to understand the real world impact of what you're doing, then you can start caring about it a bit more. I'm bringing in somebody called Anne Currie, who is a tech ethicist and speaker and lecturer. And she's actually written some really great nonfiction books, which I'd recommend everyone reads. Start with Utopia 5. And that's about asking, well, is this ethical? Can we continue to do these things? Kant talks about things about sustainability. If it's not sustainable for everyone, it's not ethical. So when I mention 3 billion people currently don't use the internet, it's like, can we continue to just keep on doing things the same way? And then John Booth, who is a data center expert to help us really understand

what the reality is on the ground. What do these data centers really look like? And then Amanda Brock from Open UK and the conference will be joining us as well to talk about a kind of open source and how we can make the world kind of a better place by getting involved in these communities. So that'll be a really great panel. But what I'm also doing is releasing this as an online course. So for people who want to get involved, it'll be very intimate, about 15 seats on each course over three weeks for you to actually work and talk directly with some of these experts and me to figure out what you want to do in the world of climate change and how you can take those first steps. So it'll be a journey that even starts with an eco-therapist to help us deal with climate

grief and wonder about the things we can do as individuals to feel better in ourselves and be happier. So I think that'll be a really great thing for a lot of people. And yeah, not only that, but it'll be great for you, but it also goes towards making the world a better place. So 50% of the course fees will be donated, 25% to charity, and 25% supporting open source projects. So I think it kind of just win, win, win. And that's the story of sustainability in general. It's a win, win, win for everyone. If you start

seeing the world through a lens of sustainability, you'll save money, you'll sleep better at night, you'll get involved with some really great communities and meet some really great people who care about this as well. And yeah, it'll be a brighter future. If people want to learn more, where can they find you? So if you want to learn more about what I'm up to, I'm on Twitter under Aaron Cloud. That's A-E-R-I-N, Cloud. And then you can also find me on LinkedIn.

But I also run my own podcast that was inspired by Corey. We're called Public Cloud for Public Good, talking about cloud sustainability and how to make the world a better place through the use of public cloud services. And we will, of course, put a link to that in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it, as always. Thank you. Aaron Booth, the Ted Lasso of cloud. I'm cloud economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this episode, please leave a five-star review on your podcast

platform of choice, along with an angry and insulting comment that I will immediately scale to zero in true serverless fashion. If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need the Duck Bill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duck Bill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

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